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January 20, 2025
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India makes use of AI to cease stampedes at world's greatest gathering
Eager to enhance India's abysmal crowd administration document at large-scale spiritual occasions, organizers of the world's largest human gathering are utilizing synthetic intelligence to attempt to forestall stampedes.
Organizers predict as much as 400 million pilgrims will go to the Kumbh Mela, a millennia-old sacred present of Hindu piety and ritual bathing that started Monday and runs for six weeks.
Lethal crowd crushes are a infamous characteristic of Indian spiritual festivals, and the Kumbh Mela, with its unfathomable throngs of devotees, has a grim observe document of stampedes.
"We would like everybody to return residence fortunately after having fulfilled their non secular duties," Amit Kumar, a senior police officer heading tech operations within the competition, instructed AFP.
"AI helps us keep away from reaching that essential mass in delicate locations."
Greater than 400 individuals died after being trampled or drowned on the Kumbh Mela on a single day of the competition in 1954, one of many largest tolls in a crowd-related catastrophe globally.
One other 36 individuals have been crushed to loss of life in 2013, the final time the competition was staged within the northern metropolis of Prayagraj.
However this time, authorities say the expertise they’ve deployed will assist them collect correct estimates of crowd sizes, permitting them to be higher ready for potential hassle.
Police say they’ve put in round 300 cameras on the competition web site and on roads resulting in the sprawling encampment, mounted on poles and a fleet of overhead drones.
Not removed from the non secular middle of the competition on the confluence of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers, the community is overseen in a glass-paneled command and management room by a small military of law enforcement officials and technicians.
"We are able to take a look at your entire Kumbh Mela from right here," stated Kumar. "There are digital camera angles the place we can not even see full our bodies and we’ve to rely utilizing heads or torsos."
Kumar stated the footage fed into an AI algorithm that provides its handlers an general estimate of a crowd stretching for miles in each course, cross-checked towards knowledge from railways and bus operators.
"We’re utilizing AI to trace individuals circulate, crowd density at numerous inlets, including them up after which interpolating from there," he added.
The system sounds the alarm if sections of the gang get so concentrated that they pose a security menace.
'Makes us really feel protected'
The Kumbh Mela is rooted in Hindu mythology, a battle between deities and demons for management of a pitcher containing the nectar of immortality.
Organizers say the size of this 12 months's competition is that of a brief nation — with numbers anticipated to complete across the mixed populations of the US and Canada.
Some six million devotees took a dip within the river on the primary morning of the competition, based on official estimates.
With a congregation that measurement, Kumar stated that some extent of crowd crush is inevitable.
"The non-public bubble of a person is kind of massive within the West," stated Kumar, explaining how the essential threshold at which AI crowd management programs ring the alarm is greater than in different nations utilizing related crowd administration programs.
"The usual there’s three individuals per sq. foot," he added. "However we will afford to go a number of instances greater than that."
Organizers have been wanting to tout the technological developments of this 12 months's version of the Kumbh Mela and their attendant advantages for pilgrims.
Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath, a religious Hindu monk whose authorities is answerable for organizing the competition, has described it as an occasion "on the confluence of religion and modernity".
"The truth that there are cameras and drones makes us really feel protected," 28-year-old automotive engineer Harshit Joshi, one of many tens of millions of pilgrims to reach for the beginning of the competition, instructed AFP.
© 2025 AFP
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