When the rain comes down in Bengaluru, the roads can change within minutes.
Water fills potholes, hides their depth and turns what looks like an ordinary stretch of road into a risky one. For commuters, avoiding one pothole often means swerving into another lane, while two-wheelers face an even greater danger.
For Bengaluru techie Gaurav Sen, this was an everyday reality. He would drive past dozens of potholes on his way to work. But when his wife became pregnant, those same roads began to feel different.
Every trip to the doctor meant navigating broken stretches of road, bumps and potholes.
The problem had become personal.
So Gaurav decided to build something that could do more than simply point out a pothole.
What if a pothole report could also tell you who must fix it?
That idea became Pothole Reporter, an app designed to make reporting road damage almost effortless.
The process is simple. A driver mounts their phone, starts driving and lets the app do the work.
Using the phone’s camera, GPS and built-in sensors, the technology detects potholes along the route and records their exact location. But the interesting part comes next: the app searches government contracts to identify the contractor responsible for that particular stretch of road.
The app uses a phone’s camera, GPS and built-in sensors to detect potholes and record their exact locations.
It then prepares a complaint with the pothole’s photograph, location and details of the responsible contractor.
In other words, the aim isn’t just to say, “There’s a pothole here.”
It is to ask, “Who is responsible for fixing it?”
Built in a day, for a problem decades old
What makes Gaurav’s experiment even more striking is how simply it began.
He built the app in just one day, without funding or a large team. At only around 4 MB, it is a completely bootstrapped attempt to tackle a problem that Indian cities have struggled with for decades.
And the need is far from small. In 2023 alone, potholes were linked to 5,840 road accidents and 2,161 deaths in India.
Pothole Reporter is currently in beta, with a Google Play launch expected in September. The Bengaluru Development Authority has also shown interest in integrating the technology with its systems.
Built in a day without funding or a large team, the 4 MB app aims to make reporting road damage simpler and more accountable.
For Gaurav, the bigger idea is simple: technology should not stop at detecting a problem.
If a phone can spot a pothole in seconds, identify where it is and trace the road back to the contractor who built it, perhaps fixing the road can become just as accountable.
Sometimes, innovation doesn’t begin in a lab. It begins with a problem we drive past every single day, until someone decides to stop and do something about it.
