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Successful Kumbh earns Akhilesh a Harvard invite

The successful hosting of Mahakumbh 2013 has earned Uttar Pradesh chief minister Akhilesh Yadav an invite from Harvard University to speak on how the 55-day religious congregation, which attracted tens of millions of people from India and around the world, went off like clockwork earning praise for its organisation.

Urban development minister Mohammad Azam Khan, who has also been invited for the 25 April event, said it was a matter of great honour that the efforts of the state government were being recognized by such a world-famous university.

Harvard would pay all the expenses for the trip.

A 50-member multi-disciplinary team, including faculty and student researchers from Harvard University, had travelled to Allahabad in January to document and analyse the processes involved in the successful Kumbh Mela.

The world’s largest religious festival occurs every 12 years and draws millions of visitors to a temporary, purpose-built tent city on the banks of the Ganga and the Yamuna.

Harvard’s year-long inter-faculty project, coordinated by its South Asia Institute and its Global Health Institute, was keeping in mind the ‘focus on urbanisation’, a faculty member said.

‘The very fact that to accommodate the millions of pilgrims who journey to Allahabad to bathe in the sacred confluence of the Ganga and Yamuna, the Uttar Pradesh government created a temporary city in the flood plain of the river - that is worth a study,’ an official said. ‘The city, laid out on a grid, was constructed and then ‘deconstructed’ in a matter of weeks. Within the grid, multiple aspects of contemporary urbanism come to fruition, including spatial zoning, an electricity grid, food and water distribution, physical infrastructure construction, mass vaccinations, public gathering spaces, and nighttime social events,’ the official said. The multi-disciplinary team from Harvard had studied various aspects of Kumbh 2013 including urbanism, business and public health and religion at the mela.

Diana Eck, professor of comparative religion and India studies at Harvard, led a group of graduate and undergraduate researchers who studied the ritual use of flowers and their environmental impact, the diversity of sacred trees, pollution and the effects of dams on the Ganga, the relationship between faith and science and the ‘green’ Kumbh movement.

The study of urbanism at the Kumbh was done by a team led by Rahul Mehrotra, who chairs the Department of Urban Planning and Design at Harvard. Students documented, at a macro-level, the spaces at the Kumbh mela campus using two and three dimensional media, including plans and sections, diagrams and perspectives, as well as aerial photography.
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