Introducing Kumbh Labs: Building Agentic AI Infrastructure in Nashik

What is KumbhLabs

During the Nashik Simhastha Kumbh Mela along the banks of the Godavari river, a temporary city appears for 45 days, houses over 50 million people speaking more than 20+ languages, and then disappears. Within those 45 days, transport, housing, sanitation, medical care, crowd routing, and daily commerce must operate at the scale of a mega-city, even though the riverbanks lack the permanent physical infrastructure that a permanent city of 50 million residents would rely upon.

Since February 2026 — when Hon. Chief Minister Shri Devendra Fadnavis launched the initiative at the India AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi — our engineering and operations team has been working on the ground in Nashik alongside the Government of Maharashtra, the Nashik district administration, and Project NANDA (Networked AI Agents in Decentralized Architecture), a research initiative that originated at the MIT Media Lab. Kumbh Labs is a research and development initiative building decentralized AI-agent systems so that visiting pilgrims, Nashik's local businesses and startups, and civic departments can coordinate directly across the Kumbh ecosystem.

We started this work because we observed a growing operational bottleneck on the ground: individuals are getting access to AI on their phones faster than public institutions and small local shops are becoming ready to integrate it. During a gathering where local media projections estimate single-day crowds can reach 25 million people, a traditional centralized command center cannot manually translate and coordinate millions of individual requests for shelter, medical help, and route directions across 20+ languages in real time. Meanwhile, local homestay owners, clinics, and street vendors have no direct way to broadcast their availability to millions of visitors who cannot read Marathi or English street signs.

That's why we decided to try a decentralized agent architecture where every person, civic department, and local shop is represented by a lightweight software agent that can communicate, verify official rules, and complete transactions automatically.

KumbhDoot

We built KumbhDoot around a single operational rule: one pilgrim, one AI agent. KumbhDoot is a sovereign, on-device, resilient, and voice-first AI agent framework operating across 20+ Indian languages. We built on top of India’s AI Stack so that identity verification, consent management, and digital payments work on basic mobile phones and voice channels without requiring citizens to adopt proprietary applications.

For the district administration, KumbhDoot shifts civic operations from reactive crowd control to anticipatory coordination through Government-to-Pilgrim (G2P) routing. Because traditional command centers only see congestion after physical queues form on the streets, KumbhDoot aggregates anonymized demand signals from millions of pilgrim agents so that officials can anticipate bottlenecks and push verified, sector-specific broadcasts without spamming the entire city.

Kumbh Commerce

During a 45-day gathering of 50 million people, an enormous wave of daily consumer demand hits Nashik. However, thousands of small local providers — Nashik families offering homestays, neighborhood clinics and doctors, small food stalls, auto-rickshaw drivers, and puja flower sellers — remain invisible to visiting pilgrims because of language barriers and a lack of digital listings. Visiting pilgrims ask for essentials in 20+ different languages, while small local shopkeepers rarely list their daily stock on English-language aggregator apps or pay commissions to external middlemen.

We built Kumbh Commerce so that local Nashik businesses can transact directly with visiting pilgrims through an agentic commerce application integrated with the ONDC protocol and UPI payment rails. Kumbh Commerce connects over 14,500 local providers across 4 merchant tiers spanning hyperlocal street vendors, local transit and homestays, city retail, and enterprise brands directly to 50M+ consumer agents through Agent-to-Merchant (A2M), Business-to-Pilgrim (B2P), and Pilgrim-to-Pilgrim (P2P) workflows. A local shopkeeper in Nashik does not need to learn complex software to be discovered by a visitor from another state.

Our Research

In collaboration with researchers from MIT and Project NANDA, our research explores how AI can help manage the scale and complexity of the Nashik Kumbh Mela. The focus is on making essential information easier to access, reducing delays in finding services, and helping pilgrims and Nashik residents navigate transport, health facilities, bathing schedules, emergency assistance, and local services. The aim is to make information more accessible, especially for people who may not be familiar with the city or its arrangements.

The research examines how multiple AI services can work together to provide faster, more reliable information without depending on a single system for every request. By prioritising verified information and designing for access in Indian languages and unreliable network connectivity, we aim to make digital public services more accessible and dependable during peak demand. This research also explores how AI can help people discover nearby services and local businesses, while reducing the burden on digital infrastructure when millions of people seek information at the same time.

Beyond the Kumbh, this work can help inform how AI supports large public gatherings and city services across India. The research offers an opportunity to study how technology can connect citizens with essential information, improve access to local services, and support coordination across a complex public ecosystem. The broader goal is to develop practical insights that can help make future public events and civic services more inclusive, reliable, and responsive to people's needs.

Blogs

Between now and Simhastha 2027, the Kumbh Labs blog will serve as an open engineering field notebook. Although the Kumbh Mela is a temporary 45-day city, the operational problems it concentrates — multilingual public service delivery, high-density pedestrian mobility, hyperlocal vendor discovery, and rapid emergency response — are permanent challenges in cities worldwide.

That's why we are using Nashik as a live laboratory for population-scale agentic AI and publishing our technical logs in public.

How to Participate

While our 6-step retrieval pipeline, administrative tools, and July 2026 live demos work in controlled field trials, testing in a lab or a 10,000-person college pilot is very different from serving 50 million people over 45 days under peak cellular congestion. We still have a long way to go before Simhastha 2027, and we are inviting three groups to participate directly in building and field-testing the network:

Researchers & Engineers

Test the open KumbhDoot framework, contribute to Project NANDA's decentralized agent protocols (NANDA Index, protocol adapters, and sandbox evaluation testbeds), and join upcoming hackathons and workshops.

Operational impact: Stress-tests agent discovery, security attestation, and sub-second retrieval before peak 2027 traffic hits.

Nashik Citizens, Startups & Vendors

Onboard local homestays, dharamshalas, private clinics, pharmacies, food stalls, auto-rickshaws, and puja flower shops onto Layer 1 of the network.

Operational impact: Makes local Nashik businesses discoverable and bookable by 50M+ pilgrims via voice in 20+ languages without middlemen.

Students & Volunteers

Join the 10,000-participant pilot across Nashik colleges and the Kumbhathon Innovation Foundation community to assist with ground-truth data collection and multilingual voice testing.

Operational impact: Validates regional dialect recognition, crowd-routing accuracy, and one-tap emergency SOS workflows on the streets of Nashik.

How to Support

Building decentralized public infrastructure for 50 million people requires coordination across government agencies, physical telecom networks, and research institutions. We are calling for collaboration from government departments, telecom operators, MeitY-empanelled cloud infrastructure providers, healthcare and hospital networks, CSR foundations, and academic institutions who want to co-develop or validate population-scale public infrastructure in Nashik.

We designed KumbhLabs around four operational principles:

Agency: Keeping decision-making power with the person the agent serves.
Dignity: Working across language, literacy, device, and connectivity barriers.
Decentralization: Coordinating city-scale demand without relying on a single centralized command system.
Continuity: Ensuring that solutions built for a temporary city solve permanent civic problems.

Because the underlying framework is open and integrated with National Digital Public Infrastructure, institutional partners who help validate these systems in Nashik are helping create public-service infrastructure that can transfer to permanent municipalities and state departments after 2027.

To explore institutional partnerships, infrastructure support, or pilot deployments, visit kumbhlabs.org or contact our team directly at [email protected].

Team

Prof. Ramesh Raskar’s vision for an AI-first Kumbh places the citizen at the centre. The aim is to explore how people can use their own AI assistants to find help and connect with services.

Turning that vision into a useful pilgrim companion takes team members from Kumbh Labs — including Saurabh Sakalkar, Ankur Shinde, and Yash More. Foundational research for decentralized AI and the open agentic web comes from Project NANDA, with contributions from Mahesh Lambe, Gurusha Raskar, and Rekha Singhal.

The Kumbhathon Innovation Foundation team provides vital ground support, helping connect the work to the realities of Nashik and the needs of the gathering.

The success of Kumbh will not be measured by the number of people who visit, but also by how well we welcome, serve, and care for them. Let us work together to make Nashik a city that the country remembers not only for the Kumbh it hosts, but for the spirit of service with which it welcomes every pilgrim.

With KumbhLabs, we invite every Nashik citizen to be part of a bigger vision: building something extraordinary for Simhastha 2027, where innovation meets tradition and Nashik helps shape the future of public services for generations to come.