India Uses AI to Stop Stampedes at World's Biggest Gathering

As many as 400 million pilgrims will visit the Kumbh Mela, a millennia-old sacred show of Hindu piety and ritual bathing. Niharika KULKARNI / AFP
As many as 400 million pilgrims will visit the Kumbh Mela, a millennia-old sacred show of Hindu piety and ritual bathing. Niharika KULKARNI / AFP
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India Uses AI to Stop Stampedes at World's Biggest Gathering

As many as 400 million pilgrims will visit the Kumbh Mela, a millennia-old sacred show of Hindu piety and ritual bathing. Niharika KULKARNI / AFP
As many as 400 million pilgrims will visit the Kumbh Mela, a millennia-old sacred show of Hindu piety and ritual bathing. Niharika KULKARNI / AFP

Keen to improve India's abysmal crowd management record at large-scale religious events, organizers of the world's largest human gathering are using artificial intelligence to try to prevent stampedes.
Organizers predict up to 400 million pilgrims will visit the Kumbh Mela, a millennia-old sacred show of Hindu piety and ritual bathing that began Monday 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 center 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.
Organizers 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."
Organizers have been eager to tout the technological advancements of this year's edition of the Kumbh Mela and their attendant benefits for visitors.
Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath, a devout Hindu monk whose government is responsible for organizing 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 visitors to arrive for the start of the festival, told AFP.



Separated by LA Wildfires, a Happy Reunion for Some Pets, Owners

Serena Null is reunited with her cat Domino, who was burned in the Eaton Fire, at Pasadena Humane, an animal shelter in Pasadena, California, on January 17, 2025. (AFP)
Serena Null is reunited with her cat Domino, who was burned in the Eaton Fire, at Pasadena Humane, an animal shelter in Pasadena, California, on January 17, 2025. (AFP)
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Separated by LA Wildfires, a Happy Reunion for Some Pets, Owners

Serena Null is reunited with her cat Domino, who was burned in the Eaton Fire, at Pasadena Humane, an animal shelter in Pasadena, California, on January 17, 2025. (AFP)
Serena Null is reunited with her cat Domino, who was burned in the Eaton Fire, at Pasadena Humane, an animal shelter in Pasadena, California, on January 17, 2025. (AFP)

When Serena Null saw the flames roaring toward her family home in the Los Angeles suburb of Altadena, she ran to find her pet Domino, but the cat eluded her grasp.

"We could see the fire from the front door, and so we just didn't have enough time, and we had to leave him," the 27-year-old Null said.

The ferocious blaze reduced her mother-in-law's house to ashes, and a search of the blackened rubble the following day proved fruitless. Null feared she would never see her green-eyed friend again.

But on Friday, to her amazement, she and Domino were reunited.

"I just was so relieved and just so happy that he was here," a tearful Null told AFP outside the NGO Pasadena Humane, where Domino -- suffering singed paws, a burnt nose and a high level of stress -- had been taken after being rescued.

Domino is one of several hundred pets brought to the center as the Eaton fire roared through Altadena, forcing thousands of people to flee their homes in such a rush that many left with nothing but the clothes on their backs.

Pasadena Humane was accustomed to dealing with crises, but the sudden explosion in demand was without precedent.

"We've never had to take 350 at once in one day before," said the center's Kevin McManus. "It's been really overwhelming."

- Search and rescue -

Many animals were delivered by their owners, who had lost their homes and had to find temporary housing for pets while they themselves stayed in hotels or shelters.

But others were brought by rescue workers and volunteers. The center says on its website that when it receives a report of a pet left behind, it sends "search and rescue teams as quickly as possible in areas that are safe to enter."

The center opened up as much space as it could to accommodate the influx, even placing some pets in offices.

And it was not just dogs and cats, McManus said. There were species rarely seen in an animal shelter -- like a pony, which spent a night in the center.

More than 10 days after the fires began raging through Los Angeles, the center still houses some 400 animals, including rabbits, turtles, lizards and birds, including a huge green, red and blue macaw.

Many of the pets' owners, still without permanent housing, come to the center to visit their animal friends -- people like Winston Ekpo, who came to see his three German shepherds, Salt, Pepper and Sugar.

As firefighters in the area make progress, many animal owners are able to come and recover their pets, tears of sadness turning to tears of joy.

- Back home -

The center's website posts photos of recovered animals, including information on the time and place where they were rescued.

McManus said some 250 pets have so far been returned to their owners.

One of them, curiously, was Bombon, who had actually been lost long before the fires.

The Chihuahua mix went missing from its Altadena home in November, said 23-year-old Erick Rico.

He had begun to resign himself to never seeing Bombon again.

Then one day a friend told him he had seen a picture on the Pasadena Humane website that caught his attention.

When Rico saw it, he was so excited he couldn't sleep that night -- "it looked exactly like him," he said -- and he arrived at the center early the following morning.

When he saw his owners, Bombon "started crying a lot, wagging his tail and everything. He was very, very happy."

After the painful days of uncertainty, Rico too finally felt relief. "Now I'm just happy that he's back home."