It is a Balmi March night in Mumbai. Lolpalooza 2025 is currently finished on a high note. Louis Tomlinson, Glass Animals and Hanumankind played 60,000-odds attendees. Green Day shut down the show. But as the concert wraps, the crowd finds out that the dream is over and the nightmare has just begun.
Nasha Lewis, musicians and music teachers, like everyone, try to get out of the Mahalaxmi race course. Exhausts are so badly managed that it takes him 20 minutes to get out of the site. This is 10.30 pm. He and his friends try to book a cab, but despite the price of 100% increase, no one was found. It is 45 minutes before a taxi, finally accepts their booking, only it cannot reach the pickup point. In both directions, traffic has been taken away for one kilometer. Lewis and its group weave through the jam, walk half the length of the road and jump the divider to complete their ride. Everyone is doing the same. What was it singing about Green Day when he “Hope you had time for your life”?
At least they made it safe. Two years ago, at AR Rahman’s Adityam Palace City Concert in Chennai, organizer ACTC events sold 45,000 tickets for a gig that could only accommodate 20,000. Many ticket-holders provoked traffic and long queues for hours, only because the site was already filled. Inside, anarchy ruled. The attendees described the “stampede -like situation” in their social and media. Many women reported sexual harassment in the crowd. The Taramram City Police eventually booked a case against the organizers, charged them with a “criminal violation of the trust” and deliberately to raise the rules and threatens life.
India is in the middle of an unprecedented concert and festival boom. Global festivals such as Lolpluja and Rolling Loud (a global hip-hop festival) have reached Indian coasts, small programs such as Goa’s Sunburn are going to Mumbai, and home-developed work such as Diljit Dosanj moves to 50,000 people. India watched more than 30,000 live events in 319 cities last year. A fair number of these included tickets with more than 1,000 people. A FICCI-E report estimates that the organized live event was brought to the industry 10100 crore in gross revenue last year 16700 crores by 2027. Even Prime Minister Narendra Modi has made India’s ‘Concert Economy’ champion in a speech soon after the Coldplay visits in January. The band played Mumbai but saw 2.2 lakh attendees in Ahmedabad in two nights.
We are not ready for this. not yet. Those long queues, dirty, toilets, groping, general chaos, and lack of food and drinks? They are currently the best case. Last year, at Diljit Dosanjh’s Delhi-Luminati show in Delhi, the attendees say that the show was closed an hour before the shutdown, which made it impossible not only to get alcohol but also water. Overwhelmed attendees have thrown or excluded at hot, packed places. In 2015, at a sold-out screen in Gurgaon, a woman suffocated and could get appropriate help before she died of cardiac arrest. In 2023, four people were killed and 64 were injured during a Nikita Gandhi gig in Cochin University of Science and Technology.
“You have a lot of people who show concerts a lot of times, so if you are not ready,” says Himanshu Vaswani, director and co-founder of events consultancy 4/4 experiences, so if you are not ready, there is a lot of probability of anarchy, “the director and co-founder of the event consultancy 4/4 experiences, which recently says Himanshu Vaswani, who recently Bukes NBA House 91 and Used to work on Lolapaluja. “You can plan for ten things, but you did not plan for that 11th thing, well leading a disaster.”
Gig economy
In the Gig Business, they are preparing as a crowd for 11th and 12th cheese. They are learning from the best practices and standards prescribed by visiting international acts. Recently for the Budex NBA House event in Mumbai, the US National Basketball Association sent a team down to re -examine everything, where every security guards and firefighters were placed. Remember how LollaPalooza India’s entrance remained closed for 90 minutes from its scheduled time last year? Internal sources say the delayed because the American promoter C3 team was unhappy with some security arrangements.
Even without that external elbow, large promoters are actively adopting strict standards for public safety and user experience. For Lolpalooza India, Naman Pugalia, Chief Business Officer of Live Events at Coldplay Tour and Ed Sheeran’s show, Bookmyshow, says that he follows “global outlines like Green Guides of UK”, a well -recognized standard. “Every element, from the width of the entrance to the number of emergency exit, is planned with this approach, to ensure that the flow of the crowd remains efficient and safe, even during mass pressure points.” At the Guns N ‘Roses show in Mumbai in May, he also deployed AI-operated analytics and computer-vision tools to detect unusual crowd patterns and see out for medical emergency conditions.
Bookmyshow and districts by Zomato also work with risk-management companies such as speeds to ensure that their events are safe and safe. The plan may start a year in advance. Teams scout the site, examine public transport systems, and work with the city and state officials. They take into account the weather patterns and political events so that no one is caught unaffected. But even they cannot add wide roads, better public transit options, or adequate parking where no one is present.
“It is not only about bringing people in and exiting people, it is also about keeping them as comfortable as possible,” says Rohan Ooroi, the founder and CEO of Momentum, whose customers also include Sunburn, The Mahindra Blues Festival and The India Art Fair. “Where do the toilets go? How much water do people want? Where can they access it? We see everything.”
No one was expected to be dehydrated and clustrophobic in Lolpluja India, and Guns N ‘Roses Concert – so the organizers gave water for free or without markup. In December, in the Gig of magnetic fields in Rajasthan, there were special tents and quiet places for those who needed to temporarily escape from crowds, noise and cold.
Things do not always go completely. Sometimes, food or beer comes out. Sometimes a gig begins and ends late, coincides with crowded traffic in a large city. In the show of Diljit Dosanj in Chandigarh last November, there was not enough protection to catch all the pickpockets in the crowd.
In India, in particular, toilets get out of the water through water through a show. An India -born solution is emerging. TIDT, a patent system events developed by the vendor third wave services, uses modular, easily transportable and water-efficiency. It recycle the water used to wash hands, so the use of flush is less fresh water. And it is designed to clean with lower downtime than regular bathrooms. Vaibhav Kapoor, director of the company, says, the Guns N ‘Roses show in Mumbai has been promised at trial Run and Lolpluja.
A chorus line
The largest road, the organizers say, there is a lack of infrastructure to manage a large crowd. The new Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad (India’s largest site, with a capacity of 1.32 lakhs) is organized for every gig, five -aged sports stadiums or with wiring and doddy wiring on public land.
This worries the organizers. “All the vendors are in Delhi or Mumbai. If I am doing a huge show in Indore, it is not easy for me to get all this infrastructure.”
Internationally, cities hosting concerts often run special buses and trains to accommodate attendees. In 2023, when the rains delayed the Washington DC stop on the renaissance tour of Bayonce, it paid $ 100,000 for all 98 stations of DC Metro to safely get the attendees to stay open. For the Promisland Music Festival at Gold Coast, Australia, city officials organized free shuttle and boating services every 15 minutes, so that festivals do not close the roads and spend hours in traffic.
India is learning from these examples. For a two -night coldplay in Ahmedabad, Indian Railways organized two special trains between Mumbai and Ahmedabad. In Meghalaya and Arunachal Pradesh, the state governments are responsible for guest housing and transit, when they plan the Ziro Festival of Music and Cherry Blossom function. Meghalaya invested 23.5 crore towards its vision to develop a ‘concert economy’ in FY25 133.42 crore in return in return. In June, Assam announced his own concert economy push by signing a memorandum with Bookmisho to bring international artists to perform in the state. They are hosting a gigalum by American rapper post Malon in November.
Oberoi believes that event organizers need to work closely with planners and city officials as the events grow up. “In Mumbai, the police is active in sitting with us and trying to understand our mob management plans. Participation in some other cities is very weak.”
Stage management
All rounds, organizers are accepting that if they are serious about the protection of women, gigs must be safe for women. Over the years, Gigs have more security personnel and women guards. Low-trafficking areas are flagged off at the venue, so they are well burnt and surveys. Employees get sensitivity training to know how to look out and respond to the incidents of sexual harassment. The safety of women is a major issue to justify the construction of all-women festivals like Sonic Tigress held in Bengaluru this march.
To make giggs more comfortable for sexual minorities and people with disabilities have a stable climb. People with gender non-individuality are often forced to be frightening by the security guards of the wrong gender. They are often not allowed in the bathroom for their favorite penis. In Lolpalooza India 2023, most penis-planets were closed for most of the festival. The latter versions are thankful to fix the problem.
In 2024, 33 -year -old model and disability rights activist Virali Modi divided VIP tickets to see Norwegian DJ Allen Walker Live in Mumbai. But at the venue, at the MMRDA ground in Mumbai, she found that the place was scattered with rocks. Her wheelchair stuck, and she almost fell out. Two security personnel who assisted her and her husband demanded payment. The toilets were not wheelchairs and fled out of the flowing water quickly.
Modi says, “I messaged Booksisho and (event organizers) Sunburn on Instagram and emailed them asking about accessibility, but never received any reply.” “I would like to go to a concert where I don’t need much help. This VH1 was supersonic. I hope you will experience again.”
From ht brunch, August 30, 2025
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