At least 30 dead in India festival crush
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I'm Nick Miles, and at 14 Hours GMT on Wednesday 29th January, these are our main stories. There has been a deadly crush at the world's largest religious festival, the Kumbh Mela in northern India. State media in the Democratic Republic of Congo have confirmed that President Felix Tshisekedi will not attend a crisis meeting with his Rwandan counterpart. Scientists have concluded that climate change was a major factor in the devastating LA world fires.
Also in this podcast, in Mexico... Men in work boots and baseball caps have set up a huge tarpaulin. It's the centrepiece of a tent city intended to house casual labourers, domestic workers, kitchen staff and farmhands.
A nation braces itself for the expected influx of people deported under Donald Trump's crackdown on undocumented migrants. It is the world's largest festival. The Kumbh Mela gathering in India brings together more than 100 million people to bathe at what's considered to be a sacred point on the River Ganges. Having that many people in one place at the same time has inherent dangers and has often led to tragedies. And it's happened again. At least 30 people have died in a crush when some tried to jump over police barricades to reach a point on the river. Pictures from the scene show blankets, shoes and backpacks strewn on the ground. This woman saw what happened.
Seven of us from my family were together around midnight. Three of them are asthmatic. When the crush happened, we all fell down. Others fell on top of us. I've lost my phone and all my money. Now I don't know where the rest of my family is.
Samira Hussain is our correspondent at the Kumbela.
What we do know from what witnesses told us on the ground is that there were just hundreds and hundreds of people sleeping along the river banks. And because today is an auspicious day, there were millions of people that were expected to come and bathe in these holy waters. So there was a rush of people coming in and going out from inside the waters. And what ended up happening is that the people that were laying down on the ground were inevitably in the crush of people. Someone fell, someone got pushed, and eventually people were trampled.
The opposition leader, Rahul Gandhi, has blamed the deaths on what he called official mismanagement. What measures are in place to try to reduce the dangers?
Organizers have been planning for this event for several months. In fact, they have installed 2,700 cameras across the entire city. And more than half of those cameras are actually on the grounds of the Mahakum Mela. We actually went into the control room where they were monitoring all of these feeds and they were using AI technology in addition to their cameras and people on the ground to try and to be able to mitigate or disperse any crowds or any gridlock that happens. But I guess in this instance, something fell through the cracks, clearly.
Samira, do you get a sense that people are angry with the authorities or do they just accept that these kind of tragedies do happen when so many people are gathered in one place?
We've certainly gotten from some people here a real sense of frustration that it was presented as, you know, everyone should come here, but when people came, there was just such a rush of humanity that some people were lucky enough to be able to sleep in one of the 160,000 tents that were provided, but many, many others... We're sleeping under the stars. In fact, if I just look out from where I am right now, I can see several dozens of people that are basically laying on the ground on a concrete road. And this is where they have been staying for a day or a week.
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