A mid-sized college fest sells passes to eight thousand students, runs forty events across three days, handles somewhere between fifteen and forty lakh rupees, and is administered almost entirely through a Google Sheet, a WhatsApp group and a cash box.
This is not an exaggeration and it is not rare. It is the default. We ran fifteen of them.
The sheet is the system
Registrations arrive through a form. The form writes to a sheet. Somebody on the core team downloads the sheet, sorts it, finds the duplicates, and messages the people whose payment screenshots did not come through. Somebody else keeps a second sheet for event registrations, because events have team sizes and the pass sheet does not. A third sheet tracks who has actually paid, and it is the only one anybody trusts.
By the second day of sales, the sheets disagree. Nobody notices until the gate.
The sheet is also shared with everyone. It has to be — the person on gate duty at 9am needs to look up a name, and there is no other way to give them that. So forty volunteers have edit access to a document containing every attendee's phone number, and one of them will accidentally sort a single column without the others.
Cash is the part nobody wants to talk about
Plenty of passes are still sold in person, in cash, by volunteers, at a desk outside the canteen. That money moves through four or five pairs of hands before it reaches an account.
The problem is not that people are dishonest. The overwhelming majority are not. The problem is that there is no record, so honesty is unprovable. When the numbers do not reconcile at the end — and they never do, exactly — there is no way to tell a counting error from a lost envelope from anything worse. The treasurer, who did nothing wrong, spends the week after the fest being quietly suspected by people who also did nothing wrong.
A system that cannot prove anyone was honest is a system that makes everyone a suspect.
That is the real cost. Not the money that goes missing, which is usually less than people assume. It is the corrosion — the arguments in the core team, the reputation a fest gets, the reason good people decline to be treasurer next year.
Nobody enjoys the fest they organise
Ask anyone who has been on a fest core team what they remember. It is not the headliner. It is standing at a gate at 10pm with a printed list and a torch, arguing with a queue about whether someone's friend really did pay.
The organiser's fest is:
- verifying payment screenshots by hand, for weeks;
- a queue at the gate that never clears, because check-in is a person reading a name;
- answering the same six questions in a WhatsApp group of four hundred people;
- finding out on day two that a competition has sixty registrations and a room that seats thirty;
- not knowing how many people are actually inside the venue at any moment.
The students have a great time. The forty people who made it happen mostly did not, and a meaningful number of them do not do it again.
Every year, from scratch
Here is the structural reason this never improves: the team graduates.
A fest core team runs one or two editions and leaves. The sheet templates are in somebody's personal Drive. The vendor contacts are in somebody's phone. The hard-won knowledge that you should cap workshop registrations at eighty percent of room capacity, because attendance runs about that, lives in the head of a person who is now working in another city.
So the next team starts over. They build the same forms, make the same mistakes in the same order, and discover the same things in week three that last year's team discovered in week three. A company would call this an institutional memory problem and fix it. A fest has no institution to remember.
This is also why it has not been solved by the fests themselves. Nobody is there long enough.
Why the sector is worth fixing
India runs thousands of college fests a year. The large ones move several crore. The ordinary ones move tens of lakhs. Together it is a real market, and it is almost entirely unserved — not because it is small, but because it is seasonal, distributed across hundreds of campuses, and staffed by people who change annually. It is an awkward customer, so the good software went elsewhere.
What is left is general-purpose event ticketing, which is built for a concert promoter, not for a student body. It handles one gate and one kind of ticket. It does not handle forty competitions with team registrations, a team of volunteers who each need to see a different part of the system, or an organiser who needs to know their settlement date because they owe a sound vendor on Monday.
What good actually looks like
None of this needs anything clever. It needs the boring things to be true by default:
- Every rupee has a record. Not because anyone is suspected, but so that nobody has to be.
- One list, not five. Passes, event registrations and check-ins reading from the same place, so they cannot disagree.
- The gate takes a second. Scan, see who it is, let them in. No printed list, no torch.
- Volunteers see their part and nothing else. The person on gate duty does not need four thousand phone numbers.
- Next year's team inherits it. The setup, the structure and the numbers are still there when the people are not.
That is the whole thesis. Not a better fest — fests are already good. A fest where the people running it get to attend it, and where nobody spends the following week being quietly suspected of something they did not do.