Bengaluru, otherwise known as India's equivalent of Silicon Valley, has seen its share of cutting-edge technology solutions. However, a recent civic-tech venture discovered by a city techie is winning great popularity for addressing one of the city's most widespread issues: potholes.
Shantanu Goel, who works in tech in Bengaluru, recently posted a screenshot of a site named blr-potholes.pages.dev, featuring a geo-tagged photo of a ginormous "crater", as he affectionately called it. The publicly available, anonymous utility, simply named "Bengaluru Live Potholes Map", is intended to be a crowdsourced, up-to-the-minute database of unrepaired road barriers throughout the city.
The site allows one to post a photograph of a pothole and mark its location on a map. The creator's name is unknown, but the venture has struck a chord with indignant Bengalureans who need to battle potholed roads every day.
A combination of civic activism and techno smarts
The web has been quick to embrace this intelligent combination of civic activism and Bengaluru's legendary techno smarts. The social media world has welcomed the project as a welcome step towards people's accountability. Responses such as, "Whoever made this deserves my respect. These are the kinds of things we should be seeing from Bengaluru and a good dev presence," reflects the sentiment. Others even proposed additional improvements, such as sending weekly reports to other municipal offices nearby and enabling the app to tag potholes filled instantly as repaired. There is also a demand that springs up to redo this concept in other Indian cities for more transparency.
Will authorities listen?
Whether civic authorities have actually made the official acknowledgement of this crowdsourced pothole mapping remains to be seen. This follows after Karnataka Deputy Chief Minister DK Shivakumar had given the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) a stern 15-day ultimatum in 2024 to fill all the potholes and had also approved ₹660 crore for repair work.
In a country where official recognition is far from a guarantee for something working, the "Bengaluru Live Potholes Map" is proof of a model for how technology, driven by bottom-up effort, can spur the concern that matters for civic issues. It's a stark message that comes from Bengaluru: they're not just complaining about potholes; they're doing something about them.
Disclaimer: This information has been provided by a third party. India TV does not vouch for the authenticity of the claims made.
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