Technology, sustainability, and spirituality: An interpretive TSSAM framework from the Prayagraj Kumbh Mela

The Prayagraj Kumbh Mela, a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage event, is the world’s largest peaceful congregation, attracting nearly 660 million participants seeking spiritual purification. Managing such scale presents significant environmental, logistical, and experiential challenges. Guided by Experience Economy Theory and Transformative Service Research (TSR), this study examines how technology-enabled sustainability may contribute to spiritually supportive pilgrimage experiences.Using an abductive qualitative approach, the study develops the Technology-Driven Sustainability and Spiritual Augmentation Model (TSSAM), interpretive framework illustrating how participants perceived technology-enabled sustainability as contributing to reduced environmental and psychological stressors, that supported ritual focus, meditative engagement, and perceived sacred connection. Data was collected through in-depth interviews with 110 purposively selected pilgrims and triangulated with documentary evidence.The findings suggest that interventions, including AI-based crowd management, IoT-enabled sanitation, and digital navigation systems, were perceived to reduce logistical and environmental stressors, thereby supporting spiritually conducive conditions.The study contributes by introducing spiritual augmentation as a multidimensional interpretive construct and by explaining how experiential conditions may be enabled rather than staged within large scael pilgrimage environments. The findings are interpreted as contextually grounded qualitative evidence rather than statistical or causal generalization.