Mahakumbh success vital for Brand Uttar Pradesh, $1 trillion economy goal

“Chance-directed, chance-erected, laid and built on the silt” is how Rudyard Kipling described 17th century Kolkata. He could have just as well written these lines to paint a picture of the Mahakumbh Mela. The massive tent city, which comes up on the banks of the Sangam in Prayagraj every 12 years, will do so again a month from now.

 

Considered the world’s largest congregation of religious pilgrims, the Mahakumbh has in the past been equally infamous for deaths of devotees in stampedes, general chaos that inspired ‘lost and found’ tropes of Hindi movies, and for outbreak of diseases because of poor sanitation.

 

For Uttar Pradesh’s Yogi Adityanath government, which is moving heaven and earth to ensure that for 45 days, from January 13 to February 26, the Mahakumbh Mela passes off without untoward incidents, the successful management of the fair is a crucial part of building ‘Brand UP’ and making the state a $1 trillion economy. A Mahakumbh, with economic spinoffs for the state’s women self-help groups and its symbolism of reaching out to the Scheduled Castes and Other Backward Classes (OBCs) will also be crucial for Adityanath’s hopes of leading the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to a third successive win in the 2027 UP Assembly polls.

 

According to the Uttar Pradesh government, an estimated 400 million devotees will visit Mahakumbh and the Adityanath government is busy organising roadshows abroad and in state capitals in India to showcase infrastructure development, such as the laying of the country’s largest network of expressways, and its commitment to cultural renaissance, with the construction of the Kashi Vishwanath Dham corridor and the Ram Temple in Ayodhya. 

 

The successful management of the Mahakumbh will also help Adityanath earn national and international recognition as an efficient administrator. The successful hosting of the previous edition of Mahakumbh, in early 2013, had earned Adityanath’s predecessor, Akhilesh Yadav, who served as the UP CM from 2012 to 2017, an invite that year from the Harvard Business School to address its students and faculty on the subject.

 

However, the Samajwadi Party government’s hosting of the Mahakumbh was not without its blip. On the evening of February 10, 2013, on the occasion of the Mauni Amavasya, with an estimated 30 million devotees thronging Allahabad to take a dip in the Sangam, a lathicharge to manage the surging crowds at the railway station triggered a stampede that left 36 dead and 39 injured. Until that moment, though, the organising of the Mahakumbh that year had been near perfect.

 

Even Gobind Ballabh Pant, the first as well as the longest serving CM of UP, was not spared a similar ignominy when on Mauni Amavasya on February 3, 1954, a stampede caused the death of 800 to 1,000 devotees. A stampede took place during the 1986 Mahakumbh Mela as well.

 

S P Singh Baghel, a minister of state in the Union government, told Business Standard that the UP government organised a flawless Ardha Kumbh at Prayagraj in 2019. “I was a Cabinet minister in the UP government then. Under the leadership of the CM (Adityanath), we held two meetings of the Cabinet during the duration of the Kumbh. There was not a single accident or untoward incident at the Kumbh. So, the UP administration has already had its semi-final trial in organising a successful Kumbh,” he said. 

 

SC and OBC outreach

 

In the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, the BJP could win only 33 of UP’s 80 seats, with its allies winning another three. It was the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance’s worst Lok Sabha performance in the state since 2014, and its losses to the SP, including in Ayodhya just months after the inauguration of the Ram temple, were attributed to the disenchantment among sections of the state’s Other Backward Classes (OBCs) and Dalits. In the last few months, the Adityanath government has reached out to the state’s OBCs and SCs, which together comprise an estimated 73 per cent of its population. A shot in the arm for the BJP has been the results of the nine Assembly bypolls in November, of which the NDA won seven, including the Phulpur seat, which neighbours Prayagraj.

 

On Friday, in a ceremony significant both for its religious and social subtext, Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the Shringverpur Dham, a religious park to commemorate the legend of Nishadraj, a boatman, who helped Lord Ram, Sita, and Lakshman cross the Ganga after they had set out on their exile from Ayodhya. The park, 40 km from Prayagraj and spread over eight hectares, features a 51-foot statue of Lord Ram and Nishadraj. The Nishads are an OBC caste, estimated to be 4.33 per cent of UP’s population, and electorally influential in eastern UP.

 

Addressing a public meeting after inaugurating 167 Mahakumbh related development projects worth Rs 5,500 crore in Prayagraj, the PM emphasised the social message of the fair, terming it a “mahayagya of unity”, where millions together take a dip in the Sangam, “breaking differences of castes and sects”. He said the Lord Ram-Nishadraj statue will “impart a message of social equality and harmony to future generations”.

 

The PM acknowledged the role that the 15,000 ‘safai karmacharis’ will play in ensuring cleanliness. He reminisced that in 2019, during the Ardh Kumbh, he had washed the feet of five sanitation workers - who were all Dalits - hailing them as ‘karma yogis’, as an expression of his gratitude for their services in the Kumbh Mela campus.

 

76th district

 

The Mahakumbh tent city, spread over 4,000 hectares, has been declared the 76th district of Uttar Pradesh for the duration of the religious fair. It will have 56 police stations and 133 police posts. The UP government allocated Rs 4,200 crore for the organising of the 2019 Ardh Kumbh Mela, and for the Mahakumbh 2025, the state government and the Centre have allocated 

 

Rs 7,500 crore, of which the latter’s share is Rs 2,100 crore.

 

The tent city will have 67,000 streetlights, and provisions have been made for uninterrupted power supply. The state government will deploy 7,000 saffron-coloured buses to ply pilgrims. Hundred special trains will connect Prayagraj with the rest of the country during the festival. The number of flights to the city and parking bays for aircraft are being increased at the Prayagraj airport. As many as 329 artificial intelligence-enabled cameras are being installed for security. The PM on Friday also launched an AI-based chatbot to streamline communication for devotees. He said the use of technology will be unprecedented in organising the festival, living up to its theme of a ‘digital Mahakumbh’.

 

The state administration is building 100-bed field hospitals in each of the eight zones. It is deploying a three-tier security framework, drones, robotic firefighting units, ensuring rigorous assessments of boat safety, and water quality monitoring will be conducted. New flyovers, 10 railway over-bridges, and inner ring road construction are changing the city's infrastructure, while 61 roads get revamped. The opening ceremony will feature 2,500 ‘Make in India’ drones.

 

According to Awanish Awasthi, Advisor to the UP CM, Adityanath’s initiative to mark a “green Mahakumbh” will set new standards in organising such a big event with environmental consciousness. The civic agencies have been directed to ensure a plastic-free fair by promoting sustainable alternatives such as kulhars, dona-pattals, and cloth bags, which will also help local cottage industries. The UP government is building several 2000-bed dormitories for pilgrims, with an affordable daily tariff of up to Rs 200. Luxury tents, where tariffs could go up to Rs 35,000 a night, are also being put in place.

 

A Confederation of Indian Industry estimate during the 2019 Kumbh in Prayagraj had claimed that it would generate Rs 1.2 trillion in revenue for the state government. The Mahakumbh, say sources in the UP government, could generate revenues in multiples of the 2019 figure. Women self-help groups are entrusted with running eateries, which is expected to help 5,000 women. Rural micro enterprises and cottage industries will promote local products under the UP government’s ‘one district one product’ scheme.

 

Wiser from the Ayodhya experience, where the widening of roads and revamp of the area around the new Ram temple led to displacement of small businesses and shopkeepers, local Prayagraj BJP leaders recently requested Adityanath that the administration should take care of the livelihood concerns of people. The Congress on Monday flagged the sewage dumping in the Ganga. The state government has undertaken projects to divert four drains.

 

Cultural renaissance and tourism

 

Union Minister for Culture and Tourism Gajendra Shekhawat said that in the last 10 years, the construction of the Ram temple in Ayodhya, the corridor in Kashi, development projects in Somnath, and other projects had helped create jobs. According to the data the ministry released on Thursday, the tourism sector created 76.17 million direct and indirect jobs in 2022-23, compared to 69.56 million in 2013-14. In 2023, India’s foreign exchange earnings from tourism were $28.07 billion, compared to 19.69 billion in 2014, a growth of 42.53 per cent.

 

(With inputs from Virendra Singh Rawat in Lucknow)