For 33-year-old Gaurav Sen, a pothole was never simply a commuting nuisance. In 2019, his soon-to-be mother-in-law was injured while trying to avoid one while riding a two-wheeler, suffering a serious leg injury. The incident stayed with Sen, but it took several years before he found a solution.
In July 2026, the techie-turned-content creator developed an app he calls the “pothole reporter”. Using a phone camera, it detects potholes and, more importantly, identifies who is responsible for maintaining the stretch of road.
The open-source app is simple to use. A phone mounted on a car dashboard takes photographs at roughly two-second intervals. An AI model analyses the images to identify potholes, while the phone’s GPS pinpoints their location. The system then maps each pothole to the relevant municipal division and searches public tender records to identify the contractor responsible for the road. “The app is simply doing a basic mapping of potholes, fetching the tender data and creating a complaint,” Sen says.
Initially designed for Bengaluru, Sen has since expanded it to about seven states, including Maharashtra, using publicly available data. “The app classifies the potholes into small, medium and large—much like a pizza,” he says. “It’s the process after potholes are photographed that interests me.”
The technology, Sen says, was the easy part. He built the first version in a day or two, using OpenAI’s models for image processing. The harder task was figuring out how to make it useful to someone simply driving down a road.
Anyone can photograph a pothole. What follows is less straightforward: Which authority should receive the complaint? Which department is responsible? And if the road is still under a maintenance contract, who should repair it? Sen’s app attempts to answer these questions before a complaint is filed. “AI seems to think it’s done perfectly, but when you go on the ground and try it, it may or may not work,” he says.
Sen has worked as a software engineer at Uber, Directi and Morgan Stanley. The pothole project, however, began as a side project after he moved from Mumbai to Bengaluru last year. Its reception, however, has prompted him to think beyond the app.
Several authorities have since approached Sen to explore whether similar technology could be used elsewhere. The Bengaluru Development Authority has spoken to him about the system. Officials in Chennai have also expressed interest. For now, Sen is funding the app himself.
There remains, Sen says, a gap between identifying a problem and getting it fixed. He has sent complaints generated by the system but is yet to receive a response. He believes the next step is to integrate the app directly with municipal complaint systems rather than rely on email. “Every municipal corporation has its own complaint mechanism,” he says. “If the system could connect directly to those platforms, a photograph taken on the road could potentially reach the right authority without the citizen having to work out the bureaucracy themselves.”
The pothole app may have started with a rough patch of Bengaluru road. But for Sen, the larger question is what happens when technology can connect an everyday civic problem to the person or contractor responsible for it.