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Bangalore saw over 4,800 potholes identified on major roads in September 2025, with nearly half its key routes affected. Despite claims, many remain unfilled
Namma Potholes assigns every entry to its respective zone in the city. Each chief commissioner can access a detailed daily or weekly report of reported complaints in real time, directly integrated into their dashboards. (Image: Namma Potholes Parihara)
Bangalore’s drivers are used to dodging more than traffic. Every monsoon, craters reopen across the city’s cracked asphalt, swallowing bikes, damaging cars, and occasionally, costing lives. Complaints flood social media with photos and angry tags. Few end in fixes. But three young locals none above 25 decided to stop scrolling and start solving. Their solution? A tool that lets any commuter report a pothole in under ten seconds.
On most rainy nights in Bangalore, the city’s youth are either winding down at cafes or making their way home from college hangouts. But for three students from R.V College of Engineering, Bipin Raj, 21, Amol Vyas, 20, and Sravan Kartik, 23—one evening stalled every few metres by the gaping potholes, rain-filled craters that now pass for roads, the trio decided they were done accepting inconvenience as normal. By the time they reached home, they knew they had to build something and two weeks later, Namma Potholes was born.
Namma Potholes is not an app, it is a WhatsApp chatbot, a conscious choice made by these students, who believed people would not engage with yet another downloadable tool. “The moment you tell someone to download a different app, they disconnect,” says Bipin, who is in his final year of engineering and already placed with HP. “People want something integrated into the apps they already use. This helps build trust.”
Built in just two weeks of sleepless coding, powered by the hunger to make everyday life less hazardous, the chatbot was launched on September 14, 2025. All it requires is a ‘Hi’. A resident sends a photo of a pothole along with its location, and the bot files the entry in a city-wide database. No forms, no queues, no silent fuming. So far, 131 potholes have been reported using the chatbot as of October 30.
Alongside Bipin, the platform was built by two of his close friends and college mates, Amol Vyas (20), a third-year student already placed at LinkedIn and Sravan Kartik (23), a recent graduate now working at Goldman Sachs.
The core team of six also includes three others who manage operations and social media who built more than convenience. Namma Potholes assigns every entry to its respective zone in the city. Each chief commissioner can access a detailed daily or weekly report of reported complaints in real time, directly integrated into their dashboards.
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 aligned with the body’s vision of digital transparency and smarter roads.
The has GBA granted permission to integrate Namma Pothole Parihara into their workflow on a pilot basis, with potential for city-wide scaling. The collaboration has already acknowledged the bot’s role in improving road safety, enhancing public trust, and streamlining civic problem-solving.
Sravan explains, “We’re just students but we’re also residents who saw the issue every day. If a bunch of 20-somethings can devise a workable fix, why not us? We developed this platform so that citizens could take charge of their surroundings directly.”
These boys aren’t influencers, activists, or startup founders. They are second-generation engineers from middle-class families, trying to juggle placements, coding marathons, and the hopes of contributing to the city and the country. They are not doing this for money, either. “The intent is simple,” says Bipin. “We want this to work. With GBA’s support, this chatbot can reach a wider audience and help us build a city we’re proud to navigate.”
The support they receive have been humbling with people from other cities, individuals stuck in traffic, even municipal employees, all asking how they can build carbon copies of the platform for their own regions.
How to Report a Pothole via Namma Potholes
- Save the Number: Add the 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 logs your entry into the system automatically.
- Track: Your report is mapped and added to the database, accessible by authorities and visible to residents.
What Namma Potholes taps is neither technology nor youthful exuberance alone. It harnesses frustration, curiosity, and civic imagination. These are not just boys coding in a room, they’re residents designing routes out of apathy.
November 01, 2025, 10:02 IST
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