This TED Talk features developer, Nile Colcarni, recorded live at TED NYC, 2018.

I was only nine when my grandfather first described to me the horrors he witnessed six years earlier,

when human stampedes killed 39 people in our hometown, Nashik, India.

It was during the 2003 Nasik Kumbamela,

one of the world's largest religious gatherings.

Every 12 years, over 30 million Hindu worshippers descend upon our city,

which is built only for 1.5 million people,

and stay for 45 days.

The main purpose is to wash away all their sins by bathing in the river Godavri.

And stampedees majorly happen because a high-density crowd moves at a slow pace.

Apart from Nashik, this event happens in three other places in India with varying frequency.

And between 2001 and 2014, over 2,400 lives have been lost in stampedes at these events.

What saddened me the most is seeing people around me resigning to the city's fate in witnessing the seemingly inevitable

deaths of dozens at every kuma mele. I thought to change this and I thought why can't I try to find a solution to this?

Because I knew it is wrong. Having learned coding at an early age and being a maker, I considered the wild idea of building a system that would help regulate the flow of people and use it in the next cummaela in 2015, to have fewer stampedes and hopefully fewer deaths.

It seemed like a mission impossible, a dream too big, especially for a 15-year-old.

Yet that dream came true in 2015, when not only did we succeed in reducing the stampedes and their intensity,

but we marked 2015 as the first Nashik Kumamela to have zero stampedes. It was the first time in recorded history that this event

passed without any casualties.

How did we do it?

It all started when I joined an innovation workshop by MIT Media Lab in 2014 called the Kumbathon

that aimed at solving challenges faced at the grand scale of Kumbamela.

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