The organizers of the largest human gathering in the world are attempting to avoid stampedes by utilizing artificial intelligence in an effort to improve India’s dismal record of crowd control during major religious gatherings.
Up to 400 million pilgrims are expected to attend the Kumbh Mela, a six-week event that began on January 13 and is a millennium-old sacred display of Hindu piety and ritual bathing, according to organizers.
Indian religious festivals are known for their deadly crowd crushes, and the Kumbh Mela has a somber history of stampedes due to its unfathomable numbers of followers.
“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.”
On a single day of the 1954 Kumbh Mela, about 400 people perished from drowning or tramples, one of the highest numbers of fatalities in a crowd-related tragedy worldwide.
When the festival was last held in the northern city of Prayagraj in 2013, another 36 persons were crushed to death.
However, authorities claim that this time, the technologies they have used will enable them to obtain precise crowd size estimations, improving their readiness for any potential issues.
According to police, they have positioned over 300 cameras on poles and a fleet of aerial drones at the festival venue and along the roads that lead to the expansive encampment.
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.
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