Pujo Pilot

Durga Puja intelligence layer
PROOF OF CONCEPT · SIMULATED DATA

Which pandal, right now, without the two-hour line

Rows marked GOOGLE take their hourly shape from Google Maps Popular Times, read live from that venue's own listing. Rows marked MODELLED have no Google coverage and fall back to a curve. In both cases the festival uplift across Panchami to Dashami is modelled, not measured.

Modelled for
8:00 PM

Why this is a business, not a hackathon project

₹50,000 cr
Bengal's Pujo economy

British Council's 2019 study put the creative economy of Durga Puja at roughly ₹32,000 crore, ~2.6% of the state's GDP; trade bodies now estimate well above ₹50,000 crore across five days. UNESCO listed it in 2021. The footfall exists. The software does not.

3,000+
Registered pujas in Kolkata alone

Roughly 250 are big-budget with paying sponsors, ticketed hospitality and police coordination obligations. Those are the ones that already buy LED walls, drones and security agencies — and have nothing telling them where the crowd is.

3 buyers
One data asset

Committees pay for ops and sponsor proof. Kolkata Police and the tourism department pay for the city-wide view. Brands pay for verified footfall attribution. The consumer app is the sensor network that makes all three sellable.


What is real in this demo

Five pandals now carry a measured hourly curve, pulled from their own Google Maps listing: Santosh Mitra Square, Sreebhumi, Ekdalia Evergreen, Deshapriya Park and Suruchi Sangha. The routing is real too - haversine distances between actual coordinates, a nearest-neighbour solve with crowd-aware time shifting. Pandal names, zones, metro stations and walking distances are real.

What is simulated

The festival uplift across Panchami to Dashami, and the cross-pandal ranking - Google normalises every venue to its own peak, so its numbers cannot say whether Ekdalia is busier than Deshapriya. The thirteen pandals with no Google coverage are entirely modelled. And Google's curve is an ordinary week, not Pujo. The assistant is templated, not a language model. Committee Ops is a simulation with nothing under it.

Production stack

TodayGoogle Popular Times, read from accessibility labels
CountingYOLO-class person detection on existing CCTV, edge boxes at gates
ForecastGradient-boosted model on last year's counts + metro + weather
AssistantClaude with the crowd model exposed as tools, Bangla-native
RouteOR-Tools VRP with time windows, GTFS for metro legs

Pilot scope

One season, four committees, four gates each. Fixed fee per committee, hardware at cost. Deliverable is the ops dashboard plus a post-season footfall report the committee can hand to its sponsors — which is the artefact that renews the contract.

Why now

Cameras are already installed at every major pandal for security. Vision models got cheap enough to run counting on a ₹25,000 edge box. And the Bangla-language barrier that killed earlier consumer attempts is no longer a barrier.

The moat

Year one is a product. Year three is the only historical footfall dataset for the largest public gathering in the country — which is what the tourism department, the brands and the insurers all need and nobody else will have bothered to collect.