Contributors: Kaustubh Dhavse, Chief Advisor to CM, Maharashtra; Dr. Praveen Gedam, Divisional Commissioner, Nashik; Shekhar Singh, Commissioner of Kumbh Mela, Nashik; Dr. Ramesh Raskar, MIT and Project Nanda; Dr. Rekha Singhal, Tata Consultancy Services; Mahesh Lambe, Project NANDA; Saurabh Sakalkar, Project NANDA; Ankur Shinde, Project NANDA; Gurusha Raskar, Project NANDA

Abstract

AI Agents for Kumbh Mela

Every Pilgrim Empowered with KumbhDoot: A Personal AI Agent and Civic AI Services

A Proposal for Agentic Management at Nashik Kumbh Mela 2027

This white paper proposes an “Agentic Kumbh” framework for Nashik Kumbh Mela 2027, assigning every registered pilgrim a personal, voice-first AI agent—Kumbh Doot—capable of operating in 20+ Indian languages. Designed to function across smartphones, feature phones, IVR, and kiosks, the system focuses on two critical layers: Access Services (identity, housing, transport, payments) and Experience Services (language support, spiritual guidance, social coordination, and digital transactions). Built on India’s Digital Public Infrastructure (India Stack 2.0), the architecture emphasizes consent-driven data sharing, privacy preservation, and decentralized agent-to-agent coordination among civic, commercial, and health services. Rather than replacing existing infrastructure and crowd-control mechanisms, the agentic layer enhances predictive demand signaling and service orchestration at population scale. The proposal outlines a sovereign cloud–based technical architecture, security safeguards, and graceful failure modes designed for peak demand conditions. A 10,000-participant pilot across Nashik colleges will validate scalability, multilingual voice performance, emergency workflows, and public trust prior to full deployment in 2027.