How technology can make Nashik Kumbh Mela divine
When I got a call from a scientist of MIT Media Lab a few days back, I thought it must be about another exciting piece of technology developed at the lab. It was about technology, but more about connecting people with technology, and that too during the mass congregation of people at the kumbh, which formally began at Nashik on Tuesday. In the run-up to the kumbh, the Media Lab has been organising a series of innovation camps called KumbhaThon (styled after hackthons) to explore possibilities of deploying technological solutions during the four-month-long event. A host of leading Indian and American universities, corporates, start-ups, local municipal bodies are involved in this initiative which is the brainchild of Dr Ramesh Raskar, who heads the camera culture group at the Media Lab.
"Our involvement in Nashik is for the long term. The work of innovators is not just to create some solutions to help with the kumbh mela, but to enable Nashik to be a hub of innovation," he says.
A slew of technologies like an app for the kumbh, GIS-based digital maps, a system to track availability of medicines and an automated complaint box have already been developed. Among other solutions are for crowd management, bike sharing, community radio and cashless payments. Given the fact that the number of smartphones in India is growing, such solutions could prove to be of great help to visitors. An interesting mechanical project is the "oil extractor". During the kumbh, people donate large amounts of oil to temples. Thousands of litres of this oil are wasted as trash. A system that can reutilise this wasted oil could be of significant economic benefit and also help prevent pollution of the river.
We are trying to redefine relationships between people and technologies, spanning sectors such as health, education, food and agriculture, housing, transportation, finance, smart city technologies and local businesses using Nashik as a 'sand-box'," explained Pratik Shah, a molecular biologist from Harvard now working with the Media Lab. For instance, a health heat map is being developed to track drinking water quality, prevalence of oral diseases, lung capacity and cardiovascular health in the kumbh as well as in congested urban environments. Research teams hope to collect data sets from ten thousand visitors during the kumbh and use this data to make informed decisions about overall health and safety of the event, as well as supporting additional research endeavours. "These data sets will allow us to monitor and track health and well being of people visiting the event. It will then be used to generate a health map that shows geographical prevalence of medical conditions across India because the kumbh is visited by people from all over the country," says Shah.
Several American institutions including, New York University, Rice University, University of Nebraska Medical Center and Harvard are pitching in. Kumbh melas have always attracted people with diverse backgrounds - scientists, marketers, sociologists etc - as they act as live laboratory to study human behaviour. The Nashik Kumbh will add a new dimension to such endeavours.