At least 17 people have died and several more were injured in a stampede at a religious festival in Kolkata, the capital of India's eastern state of West Bengal. The reports, carried by NDTV on Saturday and citing officials, could not be immediately verified by Reuters, so casualty figures may still change as the situation develops.
The crush happened during Durga Puja, the biggest annual Hindu festival in West Bengal and one of the largest religious gatherings in the region. The festival centres on temporary, often elaborately decorated structures called pandals, which are built across cities to house idols of the goddess Durga. These pandals draw huge crowds — in Kolkata's case, thousands of devotees moving through streets and narrow approaches over the festival's main days, which is exactly the kind of dense, compressed crowd conditions where stampedes can occur.
Durga Puja is not a niche event. UNESCO added Kolkata's Durga Puja to its Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2021, and the festival has become a major draw for both domestic and international visitors, with pandal-hopping tours a staple of the city's autumn travel season. That popularity is part of the risk: the sheer volume of people visiting the most famous pandals, often after dark, makes crowd control a serious challenge every year.
For travellers planning to be in West Bengal during the festival, this is a moment to pay close attention to local guidance. Follow instructions from police and festival volunteers, avoid the most crowded pandals at peak hours, steer clear of narrow lanes and bottlenecks, and leave if a crowd starts pressing forward. Large religious gatherings in India have a history of crowd-related accidents, and being selective about when and where you join the crowds makes a real difference.
We'll update this story as verified figures emerge.
