My Experience at Tirupati
Tirupati is a city in Andhra Pradesh, about a 3 hour drive from Chennai. It’s right next to Tirumala, a town where the Tirumala Venkateswara Temple resides. Since the main attraction of these towns is the temple, a visit to the temple is often referred to as “visiting Tirupati”.
The temple is managed by the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams (TTD), a trust that handles the infrastructure of the temple and the flow of pilgrims. Their responsibilities also include the collection and reinvestment of the donations received.
The Tirumala Venkateswara Temple is the most popular Hindu temple. 30,000–40,000 pilgrims visit daily, and on certain days, that number has been as high as 75,000. The amount of daily donations received used to be 5 crore (~$7.5 million) until demonetization of higher denomination notes by the Indian government earlier last year.
It’s clear that the temple, built in the 14th century, was not originally designed with such scale in mind. Therefore, there’s tremendous work done to facilitate the flow of the pilgrims.
To slightly structure the discussion on the various steps taken by the TTD to handle the scale, we can guess that it has three major goals. Firstly, to ensure that the maximum number of pilgrims can visit the temple everyday. That is, attempting to not artificially limit the number of pilgrims as much as possible. Secondly, to ensure that pilgrims have as fair a wait as possible. A pilgrim should not have to wait extensively more than another who entered roughly at the same time. Thirdly, keeping such crowds safe from each other. Massive crowds and queues can lead to stampedes, like in Black Friday sales. Hundreds of deaths due to crowd panic has occurred in other holy places like Mecca. Pilgrims have to wait in queues for upwards of ten hours and frustrations can easily run high.
The TTD has taken a variety of unique approaches towards these goals. One major step is a very high quality road, with fluorescent barriers at each potentially treacherous spot, starting at the base of the hill at Tirumala to the temple. This is a long and winding road, and any compromises in construction could cause calamity. If this doesn’t sound like a big deal, it certainly is in India, where such roads are uncommon. But the interesting aspect is a minimum time limit between the two end points of the road. A vehicle is not allowed to take less than 28 minutes to ascend the hill, and no less than 40 minutes to descend. This is to disincentivize speeding, and is enforced at toll point like stations at both ends. This is a simple and cost effective (no speed cameras) way to reduce accidents, especially among impatient drivers rushing to complete their darshans quicker.
One long queue for everyone is generally the simplest and most equitable technique for managing crowds. But with so many people, it’s impossible to maintain one long queue for everyone at all times. On the flip side, if the queue is divided up like checkout at grocery stores, the number of people might cause the wait times to vary tremendously, causing a dissatisfying and frustrating experience for those receiving the shorter end of the stick. How does one ensure that there’s a fair distribution of the wait times of pilgrims?
One major step is to get rid of slower movers that could hold the queue up. Senior citizens and disabled people, along with VIPs, have a completely separate queue end to end. Not only is this necessary for these groups of people, but it also ensures that the main queue keeps on moving without slowdowns.
Then, you parallelize every aspect of the queue that you can, while maintaining the semblance of a single queue. There’s one main queue of people, which gets subdivided into many small queues for security and getting prasad (we got a little rice, an offering from the temple), and merges into one after task completion. Obviously, this won’t maintain the same ordering as before, but it’s a good trade-off compared to having only one guard performing the security checks.
After the gruelling wait, you finally get to zig-zag inside the main temple to get some time (10–15s) in front of the deity, while volunteers ensure you don’t stop moving.
Afterwards, you get to purchase ladoo (a sweet). The interesting aspect here is that each ladoo has a specific weight range it has to adhere to: 160–180 g. Instead of the ladoos being weighed beforehand, there are specific counters that offer to weigh ladoos and ensure that they meet the minimum weight. This is quicker, since this check doesn’t need to be done for each ladoo when doling them out, and most customers won’t be disgruntled by a slightly smaller ladoo. On the other hand, they get to fix orders of any customers that call them out and meet the quality standards that they adhere to.
The experience also had various shortcomings. For example, the various crowd management techniques were not all perfect. The division of the special darshan queue into special rooms filled with benches and a switched off television served to create an unnecessary amount of jostling, denial of personal space, and inequitable distribution. There are various reports of stampedes occurring throughout the years.
The amount of darshan time (10–15s) is very less, a highly unsatisfying experience for a devotee presumably waiting for hours to be with the Lord.
Finally, to attract more people that would have been otherwise been dissuaded by the long wait, there’s a special queue that has wait times of 2–4 hours, that simply merges into the main queue at a certain point close enough to the temple, which you can get a ticket for Rs 300 (~$4.5). With the addition of VIP queues based on a letter of recommendation by a politician, there’s bound to be corruption. On principle, the various tiers of payments for an expedited darshan does not help advance the idea that we’re all equal in the eyes of the Lord.
With all the discussion of the mechanics of the crowd control, we must not forget the reason for the immense and ever-increasing crowds visiting the temple. Tirupati is symbolic of the devotion of Hindus to their God(s). The Bhagavad Gita mentions that the second way of obtaining Moksha, liberation from the cycle of death and reincarnation, is the path of devotion, a complete surrender of one’s soul to the Creator. Instead of the 28 minute ascent by vehicle, some pilgrims choose to walk up 3,500 stairs. A few ascend using only their elbows and knees, while others light a diya and place it on each step, to show their commitment to meeting the Lord, even though they get only a few seconds of “screen-time”.
I could observe a lot on my two day visit there this weekend. From the compelling power of faith that brought a devotee to struggle through huge crowds and donate his bags of coins, to the well oiled machine that managed his accommodation, and probably sifted through his donation and methodically sorted it a few hours later.
The order amongst the seemingly chaotic and humongous crowds, the huge influence and impact of religion, and the entrepreneurial TTD taking up the challenge, are all symbolic of multifaceted India. I would certainly recommend a visit.