From Waze for crowds to Uber for street food – MIT innovations at Kumbh Mela

For the spiritual among the 30 million people descending on the Indian city of Nashik for this August's tri-annual Hindu festival, the event is a catharsis. For urban planners it is an opportunity to analyse city problems on a huge scale

This August an expected 30 million religious devotees, ascetics and tourists will congregate in the Indian city of Nashik for the Kumbh Mela - a 20-day Hindu festival which is one of the largest public gatherings in the world.

The mass pilgrimage of faith takes place every three years on a rotational basis in four alternating cities, and will be returning to Nashik after a gap of 12 years. For the spiritual, the event is a catharsis, where one can purge oneself of sin by taking a dip in the holy water of the sacred rivers. But for technologists, social innovators and urban planners, the staggering increase in human density is a golden opportunity to identify, analyse and study pop-up city problems at scale.