Here’s how tech companies are exploiting the Kumbh Mela this year

The world’s largest religious carnival, the Kumbh Mela in Nasik, will have a footfall of around three crore people this year. Apart from being a crowd puller, the magnificent event has also become a centre of attraction for tech companies like MIT, Nokia, Wikipedia, the Tata Center for Technology and Design, the IITs and Reliance Innovation Lab.

The trendsetters and researchers from such tech giants are looking forward to the event-‘Kumbhathon’, an opportunity to work with the masses—a larger test group—to study the stress of rapid urbanization and create disruptive solutions in the domains of health, housing, food, payments and transportation. Kumbhathon, a 365-day project, has been set-up by few organizations to come up with solutions to address the challenges like stampedes, an ordinary concern during such events.

The 30-day period will become a golden goose for them to test out frugal innovations that will, in the future, power the smart cities of developing economies.

Sophie Vandebroek, chief technology officer and president of the Xerox Innovation Group, in her address to the Kumbhathon members, said, "Our research team in Bengaluru is looking forward to collaborating with MIT during the Kumbhathon in Nasik, to pilot innovations that will make a positive difference for rapidly growing communities. Researchers at Xerox are addressing a wide range of urban challenges using a combination of mobile sensing, crowd-sourcing, and prescriptive analytics to create actionable insights for cities and their citizens."

Not just this, religious leaders like Swami Chidanand Saraswati, founder of Ganga Action Parivar, along with Sadhvi Bhagawati Saraswatiji, secretary-general of Global Interfaith WASH Alliance, too, are working to strengthen PM Narendra Modi’s renewable energy initiative. To make Kumbh clean and energy-friendly, the spiritual leaders will use their clout among devotees to promote the use of solar lamps sold by Urjakart, an Indian startup.

Under the guidance of tech companies, students are hoping on to the Kumbh bandwagon with their ideas for startup. The two apps developed by them so far are Epimetrics and Meditracker. While Epimetrics attempts to curb the spread of epidemics by digitizing doctors' logs across the city, Meditracker acts as a '911' service alerting medical personnel in case of any serious injuries.

Another innovation gaining momentum at Kumbh is the concept of crowd steering with the help of mobile towers, a real-time system that not only shows the density distribution of a large crowd but also tracks the flow, allowing people to be redirected away from saturated areas. There are also low-cost pop-up housing systems that use industrial racks from cold storage to create multi-level habitable spaces for people, and Annadan, an innovative supply chain that diverts food donated to temples to those who are hungry, thus reducing food wastage.

Image: indiatimes