Delhi teenager’s Project Sadak logs 2,927 road complaints across Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru; tracks 190 repairs

A pothole that threw his parents off their motorcycle when he was 13 left a lasting impression on a Vikaspuri teenager. Three years later, the 16-year-old has built Project Sadak, a citizen-led platform that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to route complaints about road hazards to the relevant government departments and follow up on repairs.

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As of October 26, the platform had recorded 2,927 complaints across Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru, with 190 repairs documented through photographs. Nearly 75% of the complaints concern potholes and road conditions, including uneven surfaces and speed breakers, while the rest flag issues such as broken footpaths and garbage.

In an interaction with The Hindu, Parth Anand, a Class XI student at Delhi’s St Francis de Sales School, shared that his parents were on their way to Karol Bagh to buy clothes for their grandparents’ wedding anniversary when their motorcycle hit a pothole and they fell. While his mother took two months to recover, his father took six months to heal, he said.

“This incident and seeing more accidents on the roads made me think that I did not want this to happen to my parents or anyone else again,” he said.

In January 2026, while learning to code and develop websites, he began building a platform that would make reporting road hazards simpler. Project Sadak went live in March, 2026.

The challenge, he realised, was not merely identifying a pothole but figuring out which agency was responsible for fixing it. A complaint could otherwise require a person to identify the road-owning department, contact the relevant officials and repeatedly follow up.

Project Sadak aims to take that burden off the complainant. Its AI system checks government records to identify the department responsible for a road and searches for the contact details of the concerned officer. It then drafts and sends emails to officials and follows up on the complaints. Emails seen by The Hindu showed the information including location and coordinates of the reported hazard, the date of complaint and latest status check or response from the agency.

The platform also sets follow-up timelines based on the severity of the reported hazard. More severe potholes are followed up after four days, while less severe ones are revisited after 10 days, Mr. Anand explained.

The response, however, has varied across cities. Mumbai has recorded 820 complaints and 132 documented repairs, equivalent to 16.1% of complaints, making it the most responsive of the three cities. Bengaluru has reported the highest number of complaints, at 1,645, but only 24 documented repairs. Delhi has recorded 462 complaints and 34 repairs, a rate of 7.4%, according to the platform’s data.

The initiative comes amid the Delhi Public Works Department’s (PWD) November 30 deadline to resurface around 600 km of roads in the Capital, bringing renewed focus on the condition of city roads and the need for timely repairs.

Complaints are listed anonymously on the platform and categorised as “high severity”, “medium severity” or “low severity”. Each listing includes a photograph, the date of reporting and a report number. Users must sign in with a Google account, provide their name and upload a photograph of the road; they can also add a description of the problem. The website extracts metadata from the photograph to help determine the location. Every report stays on a public map until it is repaired.

The platform says complainants’ details are not shared with the authorities or displayed publicly. It uses Firebase, a backend development platform, to support its operations.

Mr. Anand is also exploring the possibility of taking Project Sadak beyond India. He said discussions had taken place with the governments of Liberia and Fiji about extending the platform to countries where grievance-redressal systems for such complaints are lacking.

He is also involved in research at MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms, where he works on mechanistic interoperability.