How residents in Prayagraj are coping with the Kumbh surge: A day in the life

Pradeep Kumar Verma has a routine. The Allahabad high court advocate leaves his single-storey residence in Prayagraj's Naini at 9.30am.

- Kenneth John

PRAYAGRAJ: Pradeep Kumar Verma has a routine. The Allahabad high court advocate leaves his single-storey residence in Prayagraj's Naini at 9.30am. The journey, in his Swift Dzire, takes 40 minutes. He takes the Naini-Mirzapur road that leads to the new Yamuna bridge, before taking a right turn at Bangadh Dharamshala and turning on to Jawaharlal Nehru Road, which leads him to the court premises.

There, the 44-year-old walks to his chamber -- No 36 in Upadhyay Hall -- where he sits for nearly seven hours. By 5.30pm, as the crowds thin in India's largest high court, he gets up from his chair to walk down to Gate 2, his clerk balancing an unstable tower of papers and files behind him. The commute back takes another 40 minutes.

The maze of narrow bylanes of the ancient city make commute challenging, but Verma has honed in on short cuts and tricks to ease the pain. It's been this way for 20 years -- even when the city hosted the Ardh Kumbh in 2007, the Maha Kumbh in 2012-13, and the Kumbh Mela in 2019. Rinse and repeat.

In the second week of January, though, his schedule went off the road. As crowds surged in Prayagraj from January 13, when the Maha Kumbh opened, Verma found it increasingly difficult to step out. The trip now took over two hours because of clogged roads and impossible snarls at two choke points.

"The crowd choking roads and localities threw our lives out of gear. One could hardly move, stuck in traffic, with devotees crisscrossing between vehicles, pushing and shoving two-wheeler riders. I had important cases lined up but could not reach the court in time, which left my clients annoyed," said Verma.

On the holiest days, officials clamped restrictions, forcing tens of thousands to walk up to 15km to the mela area. With public transport scarce, exhausted pilgrims spent the night under the open sky along roadsides or took shelter in colleges and schools. All this meant choc-a-bloc roads and no space for vehicles to move.