Mapping India's Broken Roads with an All-FOSS Stack

Our roads stay broken because the system has no real accountability. Citizens get promises, contractors get paid, and nobody can check what actually happened on the ground. The data that would prove it exists, but it's not public and not in a form anyone can read or track.

Better Roads uses open source to change that. The idea is simple: take the data out of closed offices and put it in front of citizens, in a way they can actually read and follow over time. So people aren't left with just promises.

Here's how it works. Your phone collects road data passively while you drive. You register once, and that's it. When 100+ phones are running, they start mapping potholes together without anyone doing extra work. It's crowdsourced, so the more people join, the better the map gets.

That's also where the community part comes in. This isn't one company holding the data. It's citizens building a public record of their own roads, and using it to ask for accountability.

How to detect road quality using just a normal phone, no extra hardware.

How to put a full India map online with open tools, very cheaply.

A simple way to turn messy sensor data into something you can trust.

Why road-condition data should be public.