Tech route to a hassle-free Kumbh Mela

NASHIK: A group of students in the city is busy developing websites and mobile applications to ensure a comfortable trip and stay to Nashik for millions visiting Nashik next year for Kumbh mela.
Students from various colleges have been roped in for what has been termed as KumbhThon, a task to develop new ideas after identifying problems that the visitors might face during the religious congregation.
"KumbhThon is a technical hackathon for the event for which around 100 students have been shortlisted. They would be divided into 20 teams to develop the apps and website," said Mayuresh Pardeshi, one of the mentors of the project.
He added that a workshop was organized by MIT Media Lab USA, iNDOVATION Nashiks, Circle and Sandip Foundation in association with all engineering colleges of Nashik in collaboration with IIT-Bombay, IIT-Madras, PESIT Instructors, Tata Research Center, Reliance Innovation Lab, MKCL, KHANDBAHALE.COM, NMC, NIMA, district administration, state Police, CSI, IEEE and a stakeholders such as taxi Union, hotel owners and various NGOs.
Pardeshi said the aim of the project was to combine technical and social needs for the event, for which many projects were under process.
Students have to come upwith solutions to problems related to Kumbh, ranging from transportation to health, civic, crime and policing issues, hotels and housing, language and translation, crowd management, security, pollution, positioning, traffic and parking. The engineering students have been working on to create technical platforms for a comfortable stay for the visitors with locals at nominal rent.
One of the teams is working on ways to take care of the accommodation facilities in the city. Chitra Kalyanasundaram, an engineering student, said there would be millions of people who would visit the city during the event. "Hence, the existing capacity of hotels might not be enough to accommodate the floating population," she said.
To take care of this, it was decided to rope in locals who would like to provide some of their home space for the tourists at affordable costs.
She further said Nashikites who are willing to rent their place can post their advertisements on the sites. The tourists are thus open to various accommodation alternatives, with varying budget and facilities. This will eventually help the huge incoming crowd to get accommodated comfortably.
The tourists can search for a place by viewing advertisements posted on the website. The accommodation options with varying budgets, facilities and proximity to a desired area can be availed.
Niraj Dengale, a developer of the application, said the information in the database will be shared with the police machinery.
The police would have all detailed information about the whereabouts of the tourists in case of untoward incident or also to have safety precautions.
With millions of people visiting during the event, there is a high possibility that many may get losst.
Saurabh Sakalkar, a developer, said a mobile app called Milaap would act as a lost-and-found platform.