In a recent column for The Financial Times, ‘How the wedding syndrome could fix India,’ Victor Mallet writes about how the Indian government manages one-off events but not longer-term projects, and cites SAI’s recently- published book on the Kumbh Mela.
“It is the same Ganges on whose sandbanks the usually inept Uttar Pradesh government built a fully serviced temporary city for tens of millions of Hindu pilgrims attending the 2013 Kumbh Mela at Allahabad to bathe in the river’s waters. The festival was arguably the largest-ever gathering of humans on Earth.
So remarkable was the achievement that it is the subject of Kumbh Mela: Mapping the Ephemeral Megacity, a book featuring research from Harvard University’s South Asia Institute.”
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