कुंभ सहायक
Kumbh Sahayak
A Simhastha visitor line covering 250 mapped answers in three languages, which tells callers plainly when no confirmed live update exists rather than guessing at crowd or traffic status.
- Languages
- Hindi · Marathi · English · Hinglish
- Channels
- Inbound phone · Browser voice call
The problem
Maharashtra is running the 2027 Simhastha across two sacred geographies thirty kilometres apart, with 4,500 MSRTC buses, sixteen satellite parking lots on a sixty-six kilometre outer ring road, and Sadhugram at Tapovan spread over a projected 1,400 acres. Every one of those arrangements generates the same handful of questions, millions of times.
Ramkund and Trimbakeshwar are two different trips. Ramkund sits in Nashik city on the Godavari; Trimbakeshwar is thirty kilometres away and houses the Jyotirlinga, and on major bathing days direct vehicular access between them is severed. A visitor who plans for one and arrives at the other has lost the day.
The callers least able to resolve this by reading are the ones most likely to be affected: elderly pilgrims, first-time travellers and families from villages, navigating portals and helpline menus while walking several kilometres in the late monsoon.
What AiSewak built
कुंभ सहायक answers in the language the caller actually spoke — Hindi, Marathi, English or Hinglish — picked up from their first words rather than from a menu, and switched mid-call if they switch. Everyday words stay in the everyday register: parking, station, shuttle, wheelchair, not their literary equivalents.
Facts come from five indexed knowledge documents retrieved per question, covering roughly 250 mapped visitor answers: the Amrit Snan dates, Trimbakeshwar darshan hours and dress rules, the satellite railway stations, the park-and-ride model, Sadhugram, sanitation, prohibitions and the known scam patterns.
The design decision this agent is built around is the separation of timescales. Bathing dates hold for months. Traffic, parking availability, crowd density and queue status change by the hour. The agent treats the two differently and never dresses one up as the other.
That has a blunt consequence, and the deployment accepts it: no real-time feed is connected, so traffic, road closures, parking availability, crowd density, queue status and weather return an honest statement that there is no confirmed live update, together with the official alternative. Asked for a train timing it does not hold, it declines — and declines again when pushed for an approximate, because a plausible number given to someone standing in a crowd is worse than an admission.
Coverage includes the Amrit Snan days of 2 and 31 August and 11 and 12 September 2027 split between the two sites, which station a given corridor actually routes to, the park-and-ride and pedestrian-only approaches, the Ramkund riverfront and its new pedestrian bridges, Trimbakeshwar darshan rules, stay and Bhandaras, toilets and water points, medical posts, the Khoya-Paya booths and their facial-recognition matching, crowd-crush safety instructions, elderly and Divyangjan guidance including the UDID exemption, and the money scams to refuse.
How it runs
Conversational layer
An ElevenLabs Conversational AI agent with automatic language switching across Hindi, Marathi and English, provisioned by a checked-in build script with its prompt held in the repository as a reviewable document.
Knowledge retrieval
Five indexed documents retrieved per question rather than a single monolithic prompt, so an answer is traceable to a document and a document can be revised without re-tuning the agent.
It cannot send help, and says so
The agent has no line to a control room. It will not say the police have been informed or that help is on the way; it gives the number and tells the caller to dial it, because a caller who believes help is already coming stops moving. It also states plainly that it is not the Kumbhmela Authority, the Nashik Municipal Corporation, the police or the Trimbakeshwar Devasthan Trust.
Emergencies interrupt everything
A missing child, a collapse, a fire or a crush moves the safety instruction and a verified number to the front of the call, one question at a time after that, with no return to general questions while the emergency is live. Compliance with this is scored automatically.
What a department can replicate
- 1
Any authority running a mass gathering can reuse the timescale split. Deciding up front which facts hold for months and which change hourly, and refusing to answer the second category without a feed, prevents the single failure that does the most damage at scale: a confident answer about a road that closed an hour ago.
- 2
The second reusable piece is the honest capability boundary. An agent that cannot dispatch must never imply it has, and the phrasing to use instead is a design artefact worth writing down before the agent is built, not after an incident.
- 3
The third is register. A visitor line that answers in literary Hindi or Marathi is technically correct and practically useless; matching the caller's own vocabulary, including Hinglish, is a content decision rather than a model one.
Scope the same pilot for your department
Two districts, a bounded knowledge base, a written list of what the agent will refuse to do, and a measurement step in the call itself. That is the shape every pilot above started from.