Puttingal Tragedy And The Temples Of Modern India That Nehru Didn’t Build

The tragedy at the Puttingal Devi Temple in Paravur, Kerala, left over 110 people dead and many more badly maimed or injured yesterday (10 April). The judicial inquiry ordered by the state government will surely discover human negligence, violation of norms, and poor safety measures as some of the causes.

One thing that will not be mentioned as even a remote contributing factor to such tragedies is this counter-intuitive point: that India has too few big temples and too many small ones that have no space to grow in proportion to the size of the population swirling around them. In business terms, the customer base has grown, but not the service capacity.

This mismatch between demand for spiritual services and supply is likely to lead to such human disasters.

Thanks to his disdain for religion, Jawaharlal Nehru did not pay much attention to actually encouraging private temple-building in modern India. His idea of a modern temple was to set up unviable public sector white elephants to occupy the “commanding heights” of the economy. The Puttingal deaths tell us about the temples we have not built - or have not built right.

Temple deaths happen almost every other year. The Ratangarh Mata temple stampede in 2013 (Madhya Pradesh) killed 115 people. Two years before that, the Sabarimala temple saw 102 killed. In 2008, Himachal’s Naina Devi temple saw 146 people crushed in panic movements. The same year, the Chamunda Devi temple in Rajasthan reported 224 dead for similar reasons. And in 2005, the Mandher Devi temple in Maharashtra bid adieu to 291 unfortunate devotees in its own catastrophic stampede.

The Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams (TTD), which runs India’s richest Sri Balaji temple at Tirupati, also sees its share of yearly stampedes, but nothing on the scale we saw at other temples. One reason is it is big enough to manage the crush more effectively, and is also taking an interesting route to spread the customer base.

TTD has annual income exceeding Rs 2,600 crore on a pilgrim base of over three crore a year. Put another way, every fortieth Indian is visiting Tirupati every year (though this is an exaggeration, since many of the pilgrims may be coming frequently, and there could be much double-counting or triple counting in all this).

There is a limit to how much Tirupati can handle. Given the rise in demand for its services, the TTD is thus building Sri Balaji temples in three new places (Delhi, Kanyakumari and Kurukshetra), adding to the three already built in Chennai, Bangalore and Haridwar. Three more may come up in Gandhinagar (Gujarat), Raipur (Chhattisgarh) and Amaravati (the new capital to be built for Andhra Pradesh).

This is the way to go. India’s big temples need to expand and/or takeover the smaller ones so that we have new temple corporations coming up. India is, arguably the spiritual capital of the world, and it is time we thought of becoming a global player in spirituality. But first we have to grow bigger nationally.

India’s problem is not in the number of temples – we have them in every street corner, even embedded in wayside trees) - but too few big ones for the size of the Hindu population, now close to one billion. The rise of big temples will create opportunities for branding and franchising, and deepen the supply chain, enabling the creation of many mega spiritual business.

The small ones have too little room to expand in their current locations. The traffic is clearly too big to manage. This could be one of the reasons why so many thousands congregate in so few famous temples built for smaller traffic in different eras. And if you want fireworks in such small places, you are actually asking for trouble.

One reason why we have too many little temples and too few big ones with the muscle to expand and diversify is our “little shop” Indian mentality; we are happier running a small, uneconomic store (or even a successful one) which we can call our own instead of scaling it up to meet larger expectations. Our mentality is to think small, not big. We think kirana store, not Wal-mart. We think one restaurant, not a McDonald’s.

India needs bigger, more spacious, and more modern temples which can handle India’s growing spiritual needs. More of the big temples should open big franchises in big towns, so that over time the market is better served locally. This does not mean Tirupati will get less custom; it will get more, and at some point, the branches may even become bigger than head office.

There will be many spinoff benefits. Temples attract people, business, infrastructure and tax revenues. A good way to attract people to new smart cities is to not just build good public infrastructure, but big temples that will attract good people there.

There is also a strategic reason to build big temples. To fight conversion efforts by the big churches and mosques, India must build temples of the same scale. The Abrahamic religions build churches to dominate public spaces; in India, we have a growing public squeeze into alleys and small private spaces.

These are not the “temples of modern India” Jawaharlal Nehru may have had in mind, but then he was wrong on so many things. A modern India needs modern temples of scale and size.