Jalsa Salana UK 2026 - analysing the attendance figures

So the UK Jalsa finished yesterday and in the closing ceremony Huzur said that the attendance was 51,181 - an increase of over 5k people from last year Jalsa (where there were 46,061 attendees).

Now, I'm not fully sure how they count the number of people attending Jalsa but regardless they claim that 51,181 individual people have come to Jalsa this year.

Below is an analysis using various sources that showed that I doubt the true figure is actually this high (N.B doesnt let me paste images).

Firstly the after looking at aerial shots of the Jalsa site, I counted a maximum of 3,000 cars and as you can see in this clip (from last year but my point still stands): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJzdcNCj2eY most cars are the 5 seater ones - and there are very few cars with much more capacity. So lets assume the cars with like 1 empty seat are compensated by the Buses and cars with more capacity - overall we assuming that there are ~3,000 "full" cars each with 5 seats which means around 15,000 people attending - no where near the 50k they claim.

Now if we assume that almost all people bar a few, who have duties around the site, go to the main marquee - this is another good way of counter checking our claim. Just to give an extra liberal estimate of the attendance lets assume that total even 1,000 people are volunteering scattered around the site and not in the Jalsa Gah during the Baiat ceremony. The areas of the main marquees are 50m by 140m for both the men and women sides. Link is here: https://www.alhakam.org/jalsa-uk-2023-update-20-july

Thus the total area of both the men and womens Jalsa Gah is 14,000 square metres. Lets also even assume that there are no chairs and everyone is sitting on the floor (you can seat more people on the ground compared to fitting chairs). If 90% of the marquees are usable for seating and the rest is for cameras, stage, equipment etc. there is still 12,600 sq meters of avilable seating. If one person only takes up 0.5sq metres of area (which is very densly packed btw) then you can fit 25,200 attendees at most across the two marquees.

This is a huge over estimate since we gave so much benefit of doubt. But even then there is NO WAY that the attendance figures are that high. Also most people that come to Jalsa don't just go for one day so its not possible they had like 17k completely unique people coming in for each of the 3 days. It makes sense at most that they just counted the number of total AIMS ID's scanned (not differentiating if they were unique or non-unique entries) - even then it seems fishy lol.

Please feel free to critique any of the methods used!