THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The Travancore Devaswom Board is considering employing artificial intelligence (AI) to deal with the huge volume of coins received as offerings at the Sabarimala temple.
The board has already received two project proposals on the same. One, from an engineering college in Chennai and the other from an entrepreneur from Kerala.
Board president K Ananthagopan told TNIE that the team from the engineering college’s AI department had shown a prototype. “We have sought more clarifications on the prototype. We will place an order only after examining all proposals, and with the help of technical experts,” he said.
The Kerala entrepreneur, too, has been asked to make a presentation before the board, Ananthagopan added. Both proposals are for machines that will sort the coins by denomination. The counting has to be done separately, but the job will be less cumbersome.
At present, there are three coin-sorting machines at Sabarimala. They separate coins en masse -- by removing other materials such as rice, flowers, and folded currencies that are deposited in the offering boxes. It does not offer segregation by coin denomination.
This year, the board is yet to finish the counting of coins even a week into the process. The president said it would take another week for the counting to end. “We plan to install the new machines before the next pilgrimage season. It can save a lot of manpower. The segregation and counting of coins is a stressful job. Getting machines to do the job will be helpful,” he added.