Tired of Bengaluru’s potholes, techie built an app to report them

He was on a routine drive from Cunningham Road to HSR Layout in Bengaluru and he counted 12 potholes. It was not the only bad stretch he had encountered. Gaurav Sen is 33-year-old and runs AI Engg and InterviewReady that offers courses for software engineers. He works out of multiple offices in the city — one in Hebbal, a coworking space on Cunningham Road and another on Church Street.

On his way home to Hebbal from Cunningham Road, he has two routes to choose from, “one of which is pretty bad”. “There would be batches of potholes in one spot or another,” Sen said.

Gaurav Sen decided to “do something about it”. He wasn’t planning to file a complaint and forget. He wanted the entire system to shake. And he was adamant.

The result is Pothole Reporter, an app that records potholes, pins down their location and identifies the contractor responsible for the road before preparing a complaint to the authorities.

Sen’s concerns come against the backdrop of a larger problem on Bengaluru’s roads.

Last month, a woman died in Ananth Nagar, near Hebbagoddi, when the two-wheeler on which she was travelling as a pillion rider skidded and a mini goods vehicle ran over her. Her death had brought residents of Ananth Nagar onto the streets, with many pointing to the poor condition of roads in the area and the lack of safe alternatives.

Personal experiences shaped decision

Sen knew the pothole problem well. He had spent years navigating potholes in Mumbai before moving to Bengaluru last year.

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“Living in Mumbai is a nice way to know that potholes are an important part of our life,” he told The Indian Express with a wry smile. “The speed breakers were acceptable, but potholes are just horrible. The jerk is really irritating. This has been something that I’ve wanted to fix — someone had made an app during COVID to report potholes, but I don’t know what happened to it.”

He said his mother-in-law was also in an accident that left her with a severe knee injury: Her two-wheeler took a spill over a patch of oil-slick road.

“It’s really dangerous for two-wheelers when you go over a pothole, and you have a truck on one side and a divider on the other. The chance of you getting in a road accident, especially as you get older, is very high.”

His assessment of Bengaluru roads, meanwhile, is blunt.

“It’s as bad as Mumbai when it comes to potholes and it’s a serious problem in terms of traffic. It’s probably one of the really bad cities especially because of the potholes — having said that, I have been to tier 2-3 cities where the issue is even worse.”

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Take a photo, report your pothole

The idea for Pothole Reporter took shape in July. Sen said OpenAI had approached him to promote Codex, its AI agent which can be used for various coding tasks. But it also became a personal project for him, eventually helping him complain about potholes on the way to work.

A pothole complaint generated on the app. 

He decided to use it to build the app he had been thinking about.

“It is a small 10 MB app,” he said.

“The initial version took me a few hours to set up with AI… It was so easy to get the code to work at the start. Things that would’ve taken months to do two years ago were done in hours.”

After that, it took him a couple of days to manually go through the AI-generated code and tweak it.

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Sen explained how the app works. When a user is on the road, the app can be installed while the phone is on the dashboard or connected to a dashcam. It can take any video stream, Sen said, even from Meta Glasses.

“Once it detects a pothole in one of the images, it sends the details to OpenAI. It geolocates the pothole and figures out which contractor it comes under. All the details are added in a single email to the Greater Bengaluru Authority (GBA) Commissioner with images. And with a single click you can send the email.”

The app relies on public data on road tenders put out by the Karnataka government.

It is also set up to avoid AI “hallucinations” — instances where an AI application gives a nonsensical or incorrect answer.

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The app has since attracted interest beyond Sen’s own commute.

He said senior figures from several municipalities as well as some politicians have already contacted him. “But on the ground, action requires more than interest,” he said.

Sen’s worry right now is that Pothole Reporter’s reports may not be heeded by the authorities. For instance, an e-mail he sent mid-August is yet to be resolved.

“Unless we have API access to their system to directly log the issues, it may become another app, which is going to go nowhere,’’ he said. “We may end up sending emails that no one is reading.”

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Aren’t there government apps to report potholes? Sen said there are, but these are not easy to use.

For instance, he said, the BBMP Sahaya app requires various details which makes the user experience akin to “pulling your teeth”. A new, more user-friendly version is planned but “it is not yet a reality”.

Sen is working on getting his app approved for the Android app store. It is currently available on GitHub. But his main concern is that pothole complaints may be closed on these platforms without the actual pothole being fixed.

“People get exhausted,” Sen said. “Taking pictures of potholes all the time is not something that you want to do. When it is not fixed, it is like doing your civic duty and getting nothing out of it.”