Meet the young coders fixing Bangalore’s roads, one click at a time. india news

Last updated:November 01, 2025, 10:02 IST

More than 4,800 potholes were identified on major roads in Bengaluru in September 2025, affecting almost half of its major thoroughfares. Despite claims, many remain incomplete

Drivers in Bengaluru are more used to dodging traffic. Every monsoon, potholes reopen on the city’s cracked asphalt, swallowing up bikes, damaging cars and sometimes even claiming lives. Social media has been flooded with complaints, accompanied by pictures and angry tags. Some end in improvements. But three young locals, no older than 25, decided to stop scrolling and start solving. Their solution? A device that lets any passenger report a pothole in less than ten seconds.

On most rainy nights in Bangalore, the youth of the city are either relaxing in cafes or on their way home from college hangouts. But for three students of RV College of Engineering, Bipin Raj, 21, Amol Vyas, 20, and Shravan Karthik, 23 – an evening punctuated by potholes, rain-soaked potholes every few meters that have now become roads, the trio decided they had accepted the inconvenience as normal. By the time they got home, they knew they had to make something and two weeks later, Namma Potholes were born.

Namma Potholes is not an app, it is a WhatsApp chatbot, a conscious choice made by these students who believed that people would not engage with another downloadable tool. “As soon as you ask someone to download a different app, they disconnect,” says Bipin, who is in his final year of engineering and is already placed with HP. “People want something integrated into apps they already use. This helps build trust.”

Driven by a hunger to make everyday life less dangerous, built in just two weeks of sleepless coding, the chatbot was launched on September 14, 2025. All it takes is a ‘hi’. A resident sends a photo of the pothole along with its location, and the bot enters the entry into a city-wide database. No forms, no queues, no silent anger. So far, 131 potholes have been reported using the chatbot till October 30.

Along with Bipin, the platform was co-founded by two of his close friends and college classmates, Amol Vyas (20), who was already a third-year student at LinkedIn, and Shravan Karthik (23), who recently graduated and is now working at Goldman Sachs.

The core team of six people also includes three other people who manage operations and social media who built more than just the feature. Namma Potholes appoints each entry to its respective area in the city. Each Chief Commissioner can access detailed daily or weekly reports of complaints reported in real time, integrated directly into their dashboard.

The boys didn’t just build for the citizens, they built with the system in mind. Through a pilot, they presented the tool to the Greater Bangalore Authority (GBA), proposing a citizen-centric solution in line with the body’s vision of digital transparency and smart roads.

GBA allows Namma Pothole Parihara to be integrated into their workflow on a pilot basis with the possibility of city-wide scaling. The collaboration has already acknowledged the role of bots in improving road safety, increasing public trust and streamlining citizen problem-solving.

Shravan explains, “We are just students but we are also residents who see this issue every day. If a group of 20 people can create a practical solution, why can’t we? We have developed this platform so that citizens can directly take responsibility for their surroundings.”

These guys are not influencers, activists or startup founders. They are second-generation engineers coming from middle-class families, trying to juggle placements, coding marathons and hopes of contributing to the city and country. They are not even doing this for money. “The intention is simple,” says Bipin. “We want it to work. With GBA’s support, this chatbot can reach a wider audience and help us build a city we are proud of.”

The support they have received has been humbling from people in other cities, individuals stuck in traffic, even municipal corporation employees, all asking how they can create carbon copies of the platform for their areas.

How to report a pothole through Namma Potholes

• Save Number: Add Namma Potholes WhatsApp number to your contacts.
• Open WhatsApp: Send a message saying “Hi.”
• SEND DETAILS: Share a photo of the pothole and your location.
• Submit: The bot automatically logs your entry into the system.
• Track: Your reports are mapped and added to the database, accessible by officials and visible to residents.

What Namma Potholes has achieved is neither technology nor youthful enthusiasm. It harnesses frustration, curiosity and civic imagination. These aren’t just guys coding in a room, these are residents out there paving paths out of nostalgia.