Tiruvannamalai was all set to receive an incredible number of pilgrims on December 3rd for this year’s Karthigai Deepam festival, and the authorities decided to take no risks at all, offering one of the country’s most advanced AI-based crowd management systems inside the famed Arunachaleswarar Temple to ensure a safe and seamless experience for devotees.
The Karthigai Deepam festival is popular for being a major gathering in South India, which means that the sacred 14-km Girivalam path is usually taken by large crowds of visitors who also go through the four temple gopurams and visit the Deepam darshan. The crowd density is such that even a slight congestion point can become a very dangerous bottleneck in a flash; hence, the government has decided to deploy tech-monitored surveillance along with real-time crowd intelligence to circumvent such scenarios.
The temple received an advanced OKEAN® AI-based platform for crowd management and pilgrim safety, which employed AI-based video analytics for predicting the area crowd and enhancing situational awareness. The inputs help the authorities to make the right decisions and take the right actions. The same technology has been used previously in large religious events in India, thus proving its capability to enable smooth and safe movement. The project was executed with Synergy Telematics as the MSI, who managed cameras and core infrastructure, while Vehant Technologies served as the AI Technology partner, delivering AI-powered video analytics solutions. The AI solutions implemented cover the inner temple area, the roads around the temple, all four main entry points (East, West, North, and South Gopurams), and the entire 14km Girivalam pathway, which experiences the highest flow of devotees during the festival.
At the core of the setup is a Central Command & Control Room (CCR) located to monitor real-time dashboards displaying crowd density, people count analytics, traffic congestion, parking management, and vehicle & traffic flow patterns entering the town.
The system also included AI-based barrier jump detection to flag unsafe movements and prevent unauthorized entry into restricted zones. Additionally, ANPR cameras tracked vehicle inflow from key approach roads, enabling better traffic regulation on festival day.
Speaking on Mr. Kapil Bardeja, the cofounder and CEO of Vehant Technologies, said, “The objective was simple: to ensure smooth crowd flow and reduce the chances of untoward incidents. With a massive number of devotees gathering within a short period, we could not rely solely on manual monitoring. The AI system added an intelligent layer to our existing surveillance, which always gives the operators immediate insight into the different pressure points of the crowd and makes it possible for them to take preventive actions instead of just waiting for a reaction after something goes wrong.”
The Karthigai Deepam festival has been the most important pilgrimage in the nation. The plan of deploying the technology was to make, besides crowd safety, a more organized and real-time method.
