Maha Kumbh Mela: How AI is helping stop stampedes at the world's largest gathering

Police monitor the situation via screens at the Integrated Command and Control Centre, set up to manage and control the crowd, during the Maha Kumbh Mela festival in Prayagraj on January 17, 2025. Eager to improve the appalling record of the India When it comes to crowd management at large-scale religious events, organizers of the world’s largest human gathering are using artificial intelligence (AI) to try to prevent stampedes. Image: Niharika Kulkarni / AFP

Kn order to improve India’s abysmal record of crowd management at large-scale religious events, organizers of the world’s largest human gathering are using artificial intelligence to try to prevent stampedes.

Organizers predict that up to 400 million pilgrims will visit the Kumbh Mela, a centuries-old sacred spectacle of Hindu piety and ritual bathing that began Jan. 13 and lasts six weeks.

Deadly stampedes are a notorious feature of Indian religious festivals, and the Kumbh Mela, with its unfathomable crowds of worshipers, has a grim record of stampedes.

“We want everyone to return home happy after fulfilling their spiritual duties,” Amit Kumar, a police officer responsible for the technical operations of the festival, told AFP.

“AI helps us avoid reaching that critical mass in sensitive locations.”

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

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

But this time, officials say the technology they’ve deployed will help them gather accurate estimates of crowd sizes, allowing them to better prepare for possible problems.

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

Not far from the festival’s spiritual center, at the confluence of the Ganges and Yamuna, the network is overseen in a glass-enclosed command and control room by a small army of police and technicians.

“We can watch the entire Kumbh Mela from here,” Kumar said. “There are camera angles where we can’t even see full bodies and have to count using heads or torsos.”

Kumar said the images were fed into an AI algorithm that gives its handlers an overall estimate of a crowd stretching for miles in all directions, cross-referenced with data from railway and transport operators. bus.

“We use AI to track the flow of people and crowd density at different entrances, adding them up and then interpolating from there,” he added.

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

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“We feel safe”

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

Organizers say the scale of this year’s festival is that of a temporary country, with numbers expected to total the equivalent of the combined population of the United States and Canada.

According to official estimates, some six million devotees bathed in the river on the first morning of the festival.

With a congregation of this size, Kumar said some degree of crowd crushing is inevitable.

“An individual’s personal bubble is quite large in the West,” Kumar said, explaining that the critical threshold at which AI crowd control systems sound the alarm is higher than in other countries using systems similar crowd management techniques.

“The standard is three people per square foot,” he added. “But we can afford to go several times higher.”

Organizers were quick to tout the technological advancements in this year’s edition of the Kumbh Mela and their benefits for pilgrims.

Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, a devout Hindu monk whose government is responsible for organizing the festival, described it as an event “at the confluence of faith and modernity.”

“The fact that there are cameras and drones gives us a feeling of security,” Harshit Joshi, a 28-year-old automotive engineer, one of the millions of pilgrims who will arrive for the start of the festival, told AFP. .