Waiting Line Management at Tirumala, Large Pilgrimage Centre in India

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The Venkateswara (Balaji) Temple at Tirumala-Tirupati is one of the busiest temples in the world. As of 2005, it attracted around 20 million pilgrims every year, with the number of visitors over and above 65,000 on few days. With about 18 hours of 'darshan' allowed, this translated into a just more than a pilgrim-a-second. So, until 2002, the waiting time for 'darshan' was several hours and on a few days in the year, this even went to 24 hours. Sometimes some devotees were even forced to return without having a darshan at all. There were 32 waiting compartments to house pilgrims while they awaited darshan. Each compartment had an average capacity of 500 people. The average waiting time for a darshan could vary between 2 and 12 hours, depending on the day and season...

Darshan was the prime purpose for which a pilgrim visited the temple. The output i.e.the number of people could get darshan per day was fixed and was a combination of the processing rate and the duration available for darshan. But the pilgrims' arrival followed stochastic process. As of 2005, the processing rate of 40 pilgrims per minute translated to 2,400 pilgrims an hour. As darshan used to be allowed for 22 hours per day (2 hours was allotted for daily maintenance and other mandatory rituals), a processing capacity was 52,800 per day. This led to (52800 x 365) = 19.272 million capacity a year. When the number of arrivals per hour was greater than 2,400, people would have to wait. The actual waiting time was proportional to the number in the queue. As the pilgrim arrival process was stochastic and followed specific peaks such as certain peak weeks and peak days. Unpredictable and unreasonable waiting time for the darshan was the result. According to experts, if the arrival continued at a higher rate, the result would be a constant increase in the waiting time...

"The way to manage the queues is by either reducing the inflows or increasing the rate of outflows or both. Estimate the average number of pilgrims waiting for darshan and the average waiting time of pilgrims in queues. Inflows can be controlled by prior booking to a large extent," explained A Kesavarao, retired IIM-Bangalore professor. A few experts suggested that another way would be to increase the number of channels of entry and exit into the main temple complex and setting up parallel queue (2-3 instead of a single) lines that would enable more pilgrims to have a darshan. For instance, 72,000 pilgrims could have darshan in a day (20 hours-72,000 seconds) with a darshan time of one second in a single line but the numbers could go up to 140,000 if two lines were organized...

Experts estimated that considering the growing popularity of Tirumala, the number of visitors to the temple would reach 0.2-0.3 million pilgrims every day in a couple of years from 2012. They questioned, “Mayhem is sure to follow...

Exhibit I: Flow Chart of a typical pilgrim to Tirumala
Exhibit II: Increasing Number of Visitors to Tirumala (1960-2012) (in millions)
Exhibit III: Vaikuntam Queue Complex
Exhibit IV: New Concept@TTD: Moving Platforms

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