The gods have a PR department now.

Uttarakhand Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami just dropped the marketing pitch for the next Haridwar Kumbh Mela. He’s promising something "divine, grand, and historic." It’s the kind of rhetorical hat-trick politicians use when they’re about to spend a staggering amount of taxpayer money on a logistical meat-grinder.

In the tech world, we’ve seen this movie before. It’s the "Smart City" pivot applied to ancient ritual. When a politician says "historic," they usually mean they’re buying a lot of hardware that won't work in three years. When they say "grand," they mean the budget is going to balloon until the accountants start weeping.

Let’s look at the grit under the fingernails of this "divine" plan.

Haridwar isn't a Silicon Valley campus. It’s a town of narrow lanes, ancient stone, and a river that doesn't care about your five-year plan. Managing the Kumbh Mela isn't just about faith; it's the world’s most high-stakes stress test for crowd-control tech. We’re talking about an influx of 30 to 50 million people. That’s not a crowd. That’s a mid-sized European nation trying to take a bath in the same spot at the same time.

To pull this off, the state is leaning hard into the "Integrated Command and Control Center" (ICCC) model. It sounds like something out of a mid-budget sci-fi flick. Expect thousands of AI-powered CCTV cameras equipped with facial recognition software. The pitch is safety—preventing stampedes and finding lost children. The reality is a massive, real-time data-mining operation.

There’s a specific friction here that nobody wants to talk about: the cost of "divine" surveillance. The 2021 Kumbh reportedly saw a budget north of ₹700 crore, and that was a scaled-back version. This time, the price tag is expected to blow past the ₹1,500 crore mark. A huge chunk of that isn't going to the pilgrims. It’s going to tech vendors selling "smart" solutions for problems that have existed since the Vedic age.

We’re going to see 5G corridors installed specifically for the event. Why? So pilgrims can livestream their immersion in 4K? Maybe. But it’s mostly so the police can run high-bandwidth analytics on the crowd’s "sentiment." They’ll be tracking heat maps of human bodies to predict where a crush might happen. It’s brilliant tech, on paper. In practice, it’s a bunch of expensive sensors trying to make sense of a sea of humanity that doesn't follow logic.

Then there’s the environmental trade-off. You can’t build "grand" infrastructure without breaking things. The "historic" tag usually involves widening roads, pouring millions of tons of concrete, and hoping the Ganges doesn't reclaim its floodplain during the next monsoon. The CM is talking about a "grand" experience, but for the locals, it usually means months of construction dust and a permanent hike in the cost of living long after the last tent is packed up.

The tech industry loves a "moonshot." The Kumbh Mela is the ultimate moonshot, but with more marigolds and less oxygen. It’s an attempt to overlay a digital grid onto a spiritual chaotic-good. Dhami is betting that by throwing enough fiber-optic cables and "divine" branding at Haridwar, he can create a world-class event.

But there’s a glitch in the "Smart Kumbh" matrix. Last time around, the "historic" nature of the event was overshadowed by a fake COVID-19 testing scandal where private labs issued thousands of fraudulent reports to meet government quotas. It was a failure of oversight, not a failure of tech. You can have all the AI cameras in the world, but they don't stop the human urge to cut corners when the budget is this fat.

So, the sensors will be hung. The 5G towers will be disguised as temple pillars. The facial recognition will struggle to identify millions of faces obscured by ash and holy water. The CM will get his photo-op.

But at the end of the day, you have to wonder if the pilgrims actually want a "smart" experience. People don't go to Haridwar to be a data point in a command center. They go to lose themselves, not to be tracked by a drone with a thermal lens.

If the tech fails—and in a crowd of fifty million, it’s a matter of when, not if—will the "divine" branding hold up? Or will we just be left with a very expensive pile of obsolete servers sitting on the banks of a river that’s seen it all before?