A team of scholars and students from Harvard who studied the 2013 Maha Kumbh in Allahabad have concluded that the Kumbh Mela was much better organised than the FIFA World Cup in Brazil in 2014 and the Commonwealth Games in Delhi in 2010. The book 'Kumbh Mela – Mapping the Ephemeral Megacity' was recently released by Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister, Akhilesh Yadav, under whose watch the Uttar Pradesh government had organised the 55-day event in January-February 2013.
In their book, the researchers have described Kumbh Mela as ‘sheer human achievement of creating the temporary, yet complex, infrastructure of the 24 sq. km. Kumbh City, comparable to almost two-thirds of Manhattan’.
Over 50 Harvard students, professors and other staff members came together to visit Kumbh site where they studied the process of urban planning, public health, property rights and other issues that come from having the largest gathering people on earth all in one place.
Harvard researchers noted that a township with thousands of tents, bigger than Manhattan, built within a few days to accommodate people for 55 days is worth a study. The various bits of scholarship collected in the book covers the sheer achievement of being able to pull off something like this, that too every three years, and attempts to understand how they went about doing it.