PRAYAGRAJ, India, Jan 22, 2025 (BSS/AFP) - Keen to improve India's abysmal
crowd management record at large-scale religious events, organisers of the
world's largest human gathering are using artificial intelligence to try to
prevent stampedes.

Organisers predict up to 400 million pilgrims will visit the Kumbh Mela, a
millennia-old sacred show of Hindu piety and ritual bathing that began on
January 13 and runs for six weeks.

Deadly crowd crushes are a notorious feature of Indian religious festivals,
and the Kumbh Mela, with its unfathomable throngs of devotees, has a grim
track record 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, told AFP.

"AI is helping us avoid reaching that critical mass in sensitive places."

More than 400 people died after being trampled or drowned at the Kumbh Mela
on a single day of the festival in 1954, one of the largest tolls in a crowd-
related disaster globally.

Another 36 people were crushed to death in 2013, the last time the festival
was staged in the northern city of Prayagraj.

But this time, authorities say the technology they have deployed will help
them gather accurate estimates of crowd sizes, allowing them to be better
prepared for potential trouble.

Police say they have installed around 300 cameras at the festival site and on
roads leading to the sprawling encampment, mounted on poles and a fleet of
overhead drones.

Not far from the spiritual centre of the festival at the confluence of the
Ganges and Yamuna rivers, the network is overseen in a glass-panelled command
and control room by a small army of police officers and technicians.

"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 said the footage fed into an AI algorithm that gives its handlers an
overall estimate of a crowd stretching for miles in every direction, cross-
checked against data from railways and bus operators.

"We are using AI to track people flow, crowd density at various inlets,
adding them up and then interpolating from there," he added.

The system sounds the alarm if sections of the crowd get so concentrated that
they pose a safety threat.

- 'Makes us feel safe' -

The Kumbh Mela is rooted in Hindu mythology, a battle between deities and
demons for control of a pitcher containing the nectar of immortality.

Organisers say the scale of this year's festival is that of a temporary
country -- with numbers expected to total around the combined populations of
the United States and Canada.

Some six million devotees took a dip in the river on the first morning of the
festival, according to official estimates.

With a congregation that size, Kumar said that some degree of crowd crush is
inevitable.

"The personal bubble of an individual is quite big in the West," said Kumar,
explaining how the critical threshold at which AI crowd control systems ring
the alarm is higher than in other countries using similar crowd management
systems.

"The standard there is three people per square foot," he added. "But we can
afford to go several times higher than that."

Organisers have been eager to tout the technological advancements of this
year's edition of the Kumbh Mela and their attendant benefits for pilgrims.

Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath, a devout Hindu monk whose
government is responsible for organising the festival, has described it as an
event "at the confluence of faith and modernity".

"The fact that there are cameras and drones makes us feel safe," 28-year-old
automotive engineer Harshit Joshi, one of the millions of pilgrims to arrive
for the start of the festival, told AFP.