Varanasi City Challenge

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The Sustainable Cities Challenge Varanasi

Since launching in June 2024, we have been looking for innovators to:

Create innovative, data-driven solutions that make crowded areas of Varanasi’s old city of Kashi safer and more accessible for religious tourists, local residents and vulnerable populations (such as elderly people and people with disabilities).

Successful solutions might’ve included:

Tools that support the city to better manage overcrowding events
Interventions that improve citizen decision-making
Services that support vulnerable groups

Entries for this challenge are now closed.

Why do we need to make crowded areas safe in Varanasi?

The City of Varanasi is located in Northern India along the Ganges River. It is thought to be one of the oldest cities in the world and is an incredibly important pilgrimage site.

Large volumes of people visit Varanasi’s old city (Kashi) every year for pilgrimage, end of life traditions, and other religious and cultural activities. In 2022, the annual floating population was estimated to be 35 times the local population.

The old city comprises narrow, winding lanes, making it difficult to build infrastructure to accommodate the influx of people. A growing number of private vehicles are used to navigate these lanes, which contributes to a complex environment prone to crowding.

Varanasi seeks to attract pioneering solutions that will enable more effective crowd management, and in doing so position the city as a global success story.

Watch this to learn more about the Varanasi City Challenge

Our judges

Meet the judges for the Sustainable Cities Varanasi Challenge. They’re tasked with selecting the semi-finalist innovators who devise innovative, data-driven solutions that will make crowded areas of Varanasi’s old city of Kashi safer and more accessible for religious tourists, local residents and vulnerable populations.

Utsav Choudhury

Utsav is a trained anthropologist from Delhi University with nearly a decade of experience in the development sector. He focuses on initiatives that promote the inclusion of vulnerable groups, including persons with disabilities, women, children, and the economically disadvantaged. He has substantial expertise in implementing and managing human-centric projects and has been involved in various multilateral engagements with organizations such as USAID, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Bernard van Leer Foundation, the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office of the UK Government, and more recently, the United Nations in India.

Namrata Mehta

Namrata nurtured her passion for change-making while studying Sociology and Experimental Media Arts in India. She has spent her career around the world helping organisations in tech, philanthropy and government develop and deliver solutions for sustainable urbanisation. At UN-Habitat, Namrata leads the Climate Smart Cities Challenge, developing the organization’s approach to challenge-driven innovation in and for cities. Namrata lives in the sweltering city of Chennai, India.

Dr Ashish Verma

Prof. Ashish Verma is a Professor of Transportation Systems at IISc Bangalore and heads the IISc Sustainable Transportation Lab, where he has driven sustainable mobility research for over 15 years. His work spans public transit planning, non-motorized transport, climate-resilient systems, and crowd management, including the notable “Kumbh Mela Experiment.” With over 285 publications, he is also the Editor-in-Chief of Sustainable Transport and Livability and holds a patent and software copyright.