An evening ride home from Agra changed how one Delhi teenager saw the roads he used every day. His parents, returning from a family anniversary, struck an unfinished construction site jutting into the road, and his father lost control of the motorcycle.
The injuries were minor. The question that followed was not.
Testing the Systems That Already Existed
Parth, a Class 11 student at Saint Francis School in Delhi, first checked what recourse citizens already had. He downloaded the Municipal Corporation of Delhi’s pothole reporting app, filed complaints and waited.
He told The Better India that replies often took three to four months, by which time a monsoon could widen the same pothole. Government figures cited in that report put pothole-related road deaths in India at roughly 20,000 a year.
Building Project Sadak From Scratch
In January 2026, Parth started writing code. By mid-February, Project Sadak was live.
The platform asks users to upload a photograph, which an AI model checks to confirm it shows an actual road defect before the report goes public. Uncertain submissions are flagged for human review. Users grade severity as high, medium or low, and Parth’s three-member student team revises that grading where its own assessment differs.
Once a report clears review, the system drafts and sends an email to the relevant authority, either the Municipal Corporation of Delhi or the Delhi Development Authority. Every report and every email stays on record.
From Reports to Actual Repairs
The platform lists 307 open reports and draws 250 to 500 visitors a day, with submissions from Delhi, Bengaluru, Gurugram and parts of Haryana.
Eleven potholes have been repaired so far. Parth arranged ten of those himself in Delhi, using grant money to hire local workers and buy materials, and photographing each site before and after. The eleventh, in Bengaluru, was fixed after a post about the platform circulated widely online.
He has since met a Delhi Development Authority executive officer about a possible pilot that would route citizen reports directly into the authority’s systems. A WhatsApp reporting bot is in development.
The Wise Take
Civic technology in India rarely fails for want of ideas. It fails at follow-through, where a complaint disappears into an inbox and nobody remains accountable for it. What Project Sadak adds is not sophisticated engineering but persistence made automatic, a record of who was told, when, and whether anything changed. Eleven repairs is small against the scale of the problem, and the platform still cannot check whether a filled pothole stays filled. Its value lies in showing that documentation itself can function as pressure.
