KOLKATA, INDIA — At least 17 people were killed and dozens more injured when a sudden downpour sent a surging crowd into a crush at a Durga Puja festival event in Kolkata, West Bengal's chief minister said, in one of the deadliest incidents at a religious gathering in India since 2024.
The crush broke out as rain began falling unexpectedly during festival events marking the final days of Durga Puja, one of India's largest Hindu celebrations, according to the BBC. Witnesses said the rain triggered a rush of people trying to reach shelter, and the surge caused people to be trampled underfoot in the crowded lanes around the festival site.
Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari said a seven-year-old girl was among the dead and that 25 people were being treated for injuries; six victims had been formally identified by Saturday night. Authorities had not yet said by Sunday morning how many people were at the site or detailed what crowd-control measures, if any, were in place at the time the rain began.
Deadly crowd crushes are a familiar hazard at India's mass religious gatherings, where narrow approach roads, aging infrastructure and inadequate policing regularly collide with crowds that can run into the hundreds of thousands. Two years ago, a stampede at a religious gathering in Hathras, Uttar Pradesh, killed more than 116 people, with the toll later revised upward by officials, the deadliest such disaster in India in years and a spur for promises of tighter crowd-management rules that have been unevenly enforced since.
Durga Puja, which this year drew record crowds to pandals across Kolkata, is among the most logistically demanding events West Bengal authorities manage annually; the state typically deploys tens of thousands of police officers and installs watchtowers and barricades at the city's most popular sites. It was not immediately clear whether Saturday's event had comparable precautions in place.
Emergency crews transported victims to hospitals across the city through the night, and local television showed ambulances lined up outside at least one facility as families searched for missing relatives.
No formal inquiry had been announced by Sunday morning, but the scale of the deaths is likely to revive long-running criticism of crowd-safety planning at Bengal's religious festivals, which draw some of the largest gatherings anywhere in India each autumn.
