A tech-savvy Maha Kumbh: India aims for a safer religious festival

Impressed by tales of households separated among the many tens of millions celebrating the weeks-long Maha Kumbh Mela, outdated Bollywood movies usually featured plots during which siblings bought misplaced on the Hindu pageant and had been solely reunited a long time later. However as Sarita Singh found at this yr’s Maha Kumbh, or ‘Nice Pitcher Competition’, issues have modified.

When she was separated from her son and mother-in-law, authorities turned to cutting-edge facial recognition expertise to hint them.

Police ran her son’s {photograph} via their software program and one of many 2,760 CCTV cameras masking the pageant space within the holy metropolis of Prayagraj in northern India discovered him standing close to a tea store along with his grandmother and reunited the household in a few hours.

The 2025 pageant has been branded the ‘Digital Maha Kumbh’ by the Indian authorities, and Sarita’s story is one among many who spotlight how expertise helps the authorities higher handle what’s the world’s largest gathering of humanity.

The six-week occasion started final week and greater than 400 million guests are anticipated to affix the festivities and take a dip within the confluence of holy rivers at Prayagraj. Religious Hindus consider this confers them salvation from the cycle of start and demise, in addition to absolution from their sins. Managing the crowds is a problem as a result of the pageant web site is unfold throughout 4,000 hectares (9,900 acres), equal to 7,500 soccer fields. Practically 93 million individuals visited the Kumbh in its first 9 days till Tuesday, in keeping with organisers. Cops answerable for crowd administration mentioned they had been utilizing AI-based software program to depend the variety of individuals and forestall stampedes which have marred earlier festivals, together with the final occasion in 2013.

“The group is calculated utilizing completely different strategies, aided by AI, which performs an important position like telling us when the group surges,” mentioned Amit Kumar, a senior police officer.

The pc software program working the cameras additionally alerts authorities when it detects a surge in anyone part of the pageant metropolis, a hearth, or if individuals cross barricades they aren’t imagined to. The alerts are relayed to personnel on the bottom to take corrective motion.

“With these markers we’re monitoring the group around the clock with the assistance of over 500 individuals on the management centre,” mentioned native police chief Rajesh Dwivedi.

As for locating misplaced guests, the expertise works provided that the lacking individual has been captured on the group monitoring cameras, Kumar added.

Elsewhere, underwater drones working at a depth of as much as 100 metres (328.08 ft) ship real-time alerts if there’s an accident or a customer slips and goes below whereas taking a dip. Multilingual chatbots on the Kumbh app additionally present steering to guests from throughout India who will not be conversant in the native language.

“The period during which Maha Kumbh 2025 is being organised is much forward when it comes to expertise,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi mentioned throughout a go to to Prayagraj final month.

“I hope increasingly more persons are united via this union of knowledge and expertise.”