India Leverages AI to Ensure Safety at World’s Largest Religious Gathering.
Determined to enhance India’s crowd management at major religious events, organizers of the world’s largest human gathering are leveraging artificial intelligence to avert stampedes.
They anticipate that up to 400 million pilgrims will attend the Kumbh Mela, a centuries-old celebration of Hindu devotion and ritual bathing that began on Monday and will continue for six weeks.
Fatal crowd crushes are a tragic aspect of Indian religious festivals, notably the Kumbh Mela, which is notorious for its immense gatherings and history of stampedes.
“We want everyone to go back home happily after having fulfilled their spiritual duties,” Amit Kumar, a senior police officer heading tech operations in the festival, reported.
“AI is helping us avoid reaching that critical mass in sensitive places.”
In 1954, over 400 individuals lost their lives due to trampling or drowning during a single day of the Kumbh Mela, marking one of the deadliest crowd-related disasters worldwide.
In 2013, during the festival’s most recent occurrence in the northern city of Prayagraj, 36 more people were tragically crushed to death.
Authorities now assert their advanced technology will enable precise crowd size estimates, enhancing preparedness for potential incidents.
Approximately 300 cameras have been installed by police throughout the festival grounds and along the access roads, strategically positioned on poles and monitored via a fleet of drones.
Near the festival’s spiritual heart, where the Ganges and Yamuna rivers meet, a dedicated team of police officers and technicians manages the surveillance network from a glass-walled command and control center.
“We can look at the entire Kumbh Mela from here,” said Kumar. “There are camera angles where we cannot even see complete bodies, and we have to count using heads or torsos.”
Kumar explained that the footage was processed through an AI algorithm, which provided its operators with an overall estimate of a crowd spanning miles in all directions while cross-referencing data from railway and bus services.
Organizers describe this year’s festival as a temporary nation, with anticipated attendance equaling the combined populations of the United States and Canada.
Official estimates report that approximately six million devotees participated in a river dip on the festival’s opening morning.
