Practical AI research
for the Kumbh Mela.

Our Purpose

Kumbh Labs is an open, nonprofit research and development initiative created to study, design, and evaluate practical AI systems for population-scale gatherings. We focus on the Nashik Simhastha Kumbh Mela, where tens of millions of people gather in a temporary city, creating unique challenges in crowd mobility, multilingual communication, and service access.

Rather than promoting proprietary platforms or commercial ventures, Kumbh Labs aims to develop open-source tools, public research datasets, and decentralized protocols that remain accessible to visitors, local vendors, civic volunteers, and independent researchers.

Relationship to Parent Foundations

Kumbh Labs operates under the aegis of the Foundation for Agentic Networks (FAN), a nonprofit organization established to foster open, decentralized network architectures for artificial intelligence agents.

Our primary technical foundation is Project NANDA, an open initiative that defines standards for decentralized agent discovery and interoperability. In high-density settings like the Kumbh Mela, decentralized agent networks enable personal pilgrim agents (Doots) to communicate directly with local services, community shelters, and transport providers without relying on a single centralized bottleneck.

Kumbh Labs is also supported by the Kumbhathon Innovation Foundation, building on more than a decade of grassroots civic tech innovation, academic partnerships, and field deployments in Nashik since the 2015 Kumbhathon.

What We Build

• KumbhDoot: Multilingual, voice-first AI assistance for pilgrims across Indian languages, designed for high-density environments and intermittent connectivity.
• KumbhBazaar: An AI-assisted marketplace prototype connecting pilgrims with local informal sellers, micro-vendors, and homestays without prohibitive platform fees.
• Open Research & Datasets: Field studies, benchmarks, and publications documenting crowd communication patterns and multi-agent coordination.

Community & Collaborations

“Kumbh Labs works with a growing community of researchers, volunteers, advisors, and independent organizations. Further collaborations will be acknowledged as they develop.”