Wind of change: How India is making gigs safer and smoother

Nush Lewis, musician and music educator, tries, like everyone else, to exit the Mahalaxmi Race Course. The exits are so badly managed that it takes her 20 minutes just to get out of the venue. It’s 10.30pm. She and her friends try to book a cab, but despite the 100% surge price, none are to be found. It’s a full 45 minutes before a cab finally accepts their booking, only it can’t get to the pickup point. Traffic has snaked up to a kilometre in both directions. Lewis and her group weave through the jam, walk half the length of the road and jump the divider to meet their ride. Pretty much everyone else is doing the same. Is this what Green Day was singing about when they sang “hope you had the time of your life”?

At least they made it home safe. Two years ago, at AR Rahman’s Adityaram Palace City concert in Chennai, the organiser ACTC Events sold 45,000 tickets for a gig that could accommodate only 20,000. Many ticket-holders braved hours of traffic and long queues, only to be turned away because the venue was already full. Inside, chaos reigned. Attendees described a “stampede-like situation” on their socials and in the media. Several women reported being sexually assaulted in the crowd. The Tambaram City Police eventually booked a case against the organisers, charging them with “criminal breach of trust” and for knowingly flouting the rules to cause chaos and danger to life.

India is in the middle of an unprecedented concert and festival boom. Global festivals such as Lollapalooza and Rolling Loud (a global hip-hop festival) have reached Indian shores, smaller events such as Goa’s Sunburn are heading to Mumbai, and home-grown acts such as Diljit Dosanjh draw upwards of 50,000 people. India saw more than 30,000 live events across 319 cities last year. A fair number of these included ticketed gatherings of more than 1,000 people. A FICCI-EY report estimates that the organised live events industry brought in ₹10100 crore in gross revenue last year, a figure they expect to rise to ₹16700 crore by 2027. Even Prime Minister Narendra Modi has championed India’s ‘concert economy’ in a speech soon after Coldplay’s tour in January. The band played Mumbai but saw 2.2 lakh attendees over two nights in Ahmedabad.

We’re not ready for this. Not yet. Those long queues, filthy, overflowing toilets, the groping, general chaos, and food and beverage shortages? They’re currently the best-case scenario. At Diljit Dosanjh’s Dil-Luminati show in Delhi last year, attendees say that the bars shut an hour before the show closed, making it impossible to get not just alcohol but also water. Overwhelmed attendees have thrown up or passed out at hot, packed venues. At a sold-out Skrillex concert in Gurgaon in 2015, one woman suffocated and died of cardiac arrest before she could get proper help. In 2023, four people were killed and 64 injured in a stampede during a Nikitha Gandhi gig at the Cochin University of Science and Technology.

“You have a lot more people showing up to concerts a lot more often, so there’s a much higher chance of chaos if you’re not prepared,” says Himanshu Vaswani, director and co-founder of events consultancy 4/4 Experiences, which worked on the recent BudX NBA House, Spotify’s Rap 91 and Lollapalooza. “You can plan for ten things, but that 11th thing you did not plan for could well lead to a disaster.”

Gig economy

Those in the gig business are prepping for that 11th and 12th thing as crowds swell. They’re learning from the best practices and standards set by touring international acts. For the recent BudX NBA House event in Mumbai, America’s National Basketball Association sent down a team to double-check everything, down to where each security guard and fire-extinguisher was placed. Remember how Lollapalooza India’s entry gates stayed closed for 90 minutes past their scheduled time last year? Insiders say the delay was because American promoter C3’s team was unhappy with some of the security arrangements.

Even without that external nudge, big promoters are actively adopting stricter standards for public safety and user experience. For Lollapalooza India, the Coldplay tour and Ed Sheeran’s shows, Naman Pugalia, the chief business officer for live events at BookMyShow, says they follow “global frameworks such as the UK’s Green Guide,” a well-regarded standard. “Every element, from the width of entry gates to the number of emergency exits, is planned with this approach, to ensure crowd flow remains efficient and safe, even during peak pressure points like mass exits.” At the Guns N’ Roses show in Mumbai in May, they also deployed AI-powered analytics and computer-vision tools to detect unusual crowd patterns and to watch out for medical emergencies.

BookMyShow and District by Zomato also work with risk-management companies such as Momentum to ensure that their events are safe and secure. Planning can begin up to a year in advance. Teams scout the venue, check the public-transport systems, and work alongside city and state authorities. They take into account weather patterns and political events so no one’s caught unprepared. But even they can’t conjure up broader roads, better public transit options, or adequate parking where none exists.

“It’s not just about getting people in and getting people out, it’s also about keeping them as comfortable as possible,” says Rohan Oberoi, founder and CEO of Momentum, whose clients also include Sunburn, the Mahindra Blues Festival and the India Art Fair. “Where do the toilets go? How much water will people need? Where can they access it? We look at everything.”

No one expected to be dehydrated and claustrophobic at Lollapalooza India, and the Guns N’ Roses concert — so organisers gave out water for free or without a markup. At the Magnetic Fields gig in Rajasthan in December, there were special tents and quiet spaces for those who needed to temporarily escape the crowd, noise and the cold.

Things don’t always go perfectly. Sometimes, the food or beer runs out. Sometimes a gig starts and ends late, coinciding with rush-hour traffic in a big city. At Diljit Dosanjh’s show in Chandigarh last November, there simply wasn’t enough security to catch all the pickpockets in the crowd.

In India, particularly, toilets tend to run out of water halfway through a show. An India-born solution is emerging. TIDT, a patented system developed by events vendor Third Wave Services, uses modular, easily transportable and water-efficient loos. It recycles the water used for washing hands, so there’s less fresh water used per flush. And it’s designed to be cleaned with less downtime than regular bathrooms. Trial runs at the Guns N’ Roses show in Mumbai and at Lollapalooza have been promising, says Vaibhav Kapoor, the company’s director.

A chorus line

The biggest roadblock, organisers say, is the lack of infrastructure to manage big crowds. For every gig at Ahmedabad’s new Narendra Modi Stadium (India’s largest venue, with a capacity of 1.32 lakh), five are held in ageing sports stadiums or with makeshift stages and dodgy wiring on public land.

This worries organisers. “All the vendors are in Delhi or Mumbai. If I’m doing a very big show in Indore, it’s not easy or cost-effective for me to get all that infrastructure over there,” says Vaswani.

Internationally, cities hosting music festivals often run special buses and trains to accommodate attendees. In 2023, when rain delayed the Washington DC stop on Beyonce’s Renaissance tour, she paid $100,000 for all 98 stations of the DC Metro to stay open so attendees could get home safely. For the Promiseland music festival in Australia’s Gold Coast, city authorities organised free shuttles and ferry services every 15 minutes so festival-goers wouldn’t clog roads and spend hours in traffic.

India is learning from these examples. For the two nights Coldplay performed in Ahmedabad, Indian Railways organised two special trains between Mumbai and Ahmedabad. In Meghalaya and Arunachal Pradesh, state governments account for guest accommodation and transit when they plan the Ziro Festival of Music and the Cherry Blossom celebrations. Meghalaya invested ₹23.5 crore towards its vision for developing a ‘concert economy’ in FY25, generating an estimated ₹133.42 crore in economic impact in return. In June, Assam announced its own concert economy push by signing a Memorandum of Understanding with BookMyShow to bring international artists to perform in the state. They’re hosting a gig by American rapper Post Malone in November.

Oberoi believes that event organisers need to work closer with planners and city authorities as events get bigger. “In Mumbai, the police are proactive in sitting with us and trying to understand our crowd management plans. In some other cities the involvement is very weak.”

Stage management

All round, organisers are acknowledging that gigs must be safer for women if they’re serious about women’s patronage. Over the last few years, there have been visibly more security personnel and women guards at gigs. Low-traffic areas at the venue are flagged so they stay well-lit and surveilled. Staff get sensitivity training to know how to look out and respond to incidents of sexual harassment. Women’s safety is a big enough issue to justify the creation of all-women festivals such as Sonic Tigress, held in Bengaluru this March.

To make gigs more comfortable for sexual minorities and those with disabilities is a steeper climb. Gender non-conforming attendees are often forced into getting frisked by security guards of the wrong gender. They’re often not being allowed into the bathrooms for their preferred gender. At Lollapalooza India 2023, some gender-neutral bathrooms were locked for most of the festival. Later editions thankfully fixed the problem.

In 2024, 33-year-old model and disability rights activist Virali Modi splurged for VIP tickets to watch Norwegian DJ Alan Walker live in Mumbai. But at the venue, Mumbai’s MMRDA grounds, she found that the place was strewn with rocks. Her wheelchair kept getting stuck, and she almost fell out. The two security personnel who assisted her and her husband demanded payment. The toilets weren’t wheelchair accessible and quickly ran out of running water.

“I’d messaged BookMyShow and [event organisers] Sunburn on Instagram and emailed them asking about accessibility, but never even got a reply,” says Modi. “I’d love to go to a concert where I don’t need much help. That was VH1 Supersonic. I hope to experience that again.”

From HT Brunch, August 30, 2025

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