India deploys AI cameras and drones to secure Magh Mela 2026 crowds

This deployment is a textbook example of how AI is quietly permeating public infrastructure in the Global South. Prayagraj’s police aren’t talking about cutting‑edge models; they’re using AI‑assisted video analytics and drones to do very immediate things: count people, track crowd flows, spot anomalies and coordinate responses across a sprawling 45‑day religious gathering.([republicworld.com](https://www.republicworld.com/india/ai-enabled-cameras-drones-deployed-in-prayagraj-to-ensure-safety-during-basant-panchami-snan)) For the AI ecosystem, it shows that computer vision and edge inference have moved from pilot to production in one of the most operationally challenging environments imaginable.

For the race to AGI, the story isn’t about raw model capability so much as deployment scale and normalization. Every time a public agency successfully rolls out AI‑augmented surveillance, it builds institutional comfort with delegating perception and judgment tasks to machines, and it generates real‑world datasets that can feed the next generation of models. It also raises the stakes on governance: crowd‑control systems can easily drift from safety tools to instruments of social control. How India manages transparency, data retention, and redress around systems like this will influence norms in other populous democracies considering similar deployments.