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Ditch the rant, fix the road: Bengaluru engineer builds AI app to detect potholes
Gaurav Sen, a Bengaluru-based engineer decided he had enough of his city’s potholes posing a danger for commutersand created an app to help identify and report
We’ve all had that heart-in-mouth moment while driving when a sudden thump, a bruised car suspension, and a string of unspeakable words get directed at the authorities due to the pothole on the road. But while most of us just vent on social media and move on, Gaurav Sen, a young engineer decided that he had enough of his Bengaluru city’s notorious road craters wrecking his vehicle’s wheels and created an app: Pothole Detector.
Tired of navigating the ruined roads Sen built the app to not just spot potholes while a driver is on the road, but also digs up government records to find the exact contractor responsible for that patch and aids in filing a complaint to repair it. “There is always so much discussion around how deadly these potholes can be,” shares Gaurav, speaking of the long-brewing frustration behind the project. “I personally know a lot of cases where commuters riding on two-wheelers were injured due to potholes, including my own mother-in-law. The biggest motivator for me was that I would have loved to make this app maybe three years ago, but it would have taken me two or three months to build. Now with AI, I could literally make this in just one or two days, and was ready with it after starting working on it in July.”
Getting that level of accountability wasn’t a one-click affair, though. Sen sat through months of painstaking data research to map out a database of 2,900 government contracts, matching specific stretches of road to the officers and contractors tasked with maintaining them. While the tool is fresh off the workbench, it’s already turning heads far beyond Bengaluru’s tech corridors. “The app has just started to pick up as more people are becoming aware,” says Sen, adding: “I’ve been contacted by the Andhra Pradesh state government, who told me, ‘We’ve seen the app, we’ve taken notice, and it’s great.’”
But Sen doesn’t want to pause his ride now that he has hit the accelerator. Talking about taking this vigilante technology to other metro cities, such as Delhi and Mumbai, Sen sounds positive and realistic. “I hope I can cover more cities and states including places like Delhi. But, data collection isn’t as easy across all states. Once I get more support for the app, I might be able to scale it up. For now, I’ve absorbed all the costs myself and kept it completely free for everyone.”
How does the app work?
The concept is completely hands-free and scannable in real time. You dock your smartphone on the dashboard, open the app, switch to ‘Drive Mode’, and just go about your commute. As you drive, the app streams video and captures snapshots, feeding them directly into an OpenAI vision model that categorizes every bump by the size —small, medium, or large. “If a pothole is detected, it captures the geo-location and the picture, and attaches it in an email along with the contractor details or the specific tender,” explains Sen, adding, “Most of the contracts I’ve seen are under warranty for a year or two, so we route it to the right department, attach all the details, and say: Let’s get this fixed under this tender number.”
