Any gathering comes with a huge risk of crowd management else there’s always a chance of a stampede that can put lives at risk. And when it is the world’s largest gathering, the preparations for the same are bound to be challenging. Maha Kumbh Mela will see nearly 45 crore people coming to the holy city of Prayagraj. Spread over 10,000 acres, the Maha Kumbh district is seeing more than 20 lakh visitors daily.
To avoid any untoward incident and top notice crowd management, the authorities have put an Integrated Control Command Centre in place to keep a hawk’s eye for continuous monitoring and avoid untoward incidents, a report in PTI said.
Four such Integrated Control Command Centres (ICCC) have been established and 400 people keep a continuous watch on big screens displaying live footage and data from hotspots. They directly alert peronnel on ground on crowd density and pilgrim flow atMaha Kumbh.
Over 3000 Cameras, Underwater Drones And 60K Personnel
For monitoring purposes, more than 3,000 cameras, many linked with Artificial Intelligence technology have been put in. Apart from this, several underwater drones have also been made operations while more than 60,000 personnel are present on the ground. The authorities have ensured proper technology implementation to manage the crowd.
Superintendent of Police Amit Kumar, an Indian Police Service (IPS) officer of the Uttar Pradesh cadre and the ICCC in-charge, said the data being captured was accurate to ensure there were no more “guesstimates”.
“This is the first time in the world that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being used for crowd management at this scale. We have installed more than 3,000 cameras across the mela area and the city, of which 1,800 are AI-enabled. There is absolute no guess work, everything is based on real-time data being captured extensively,” Kumar told PTI.