The Millennium City. Now try walking in it.
Hi, I'm Vyom. I'm in my third year of B.Tech at Netaji Subhas University of Technology (NSUT), and I live in Gurgaon.
Gurgaon is supposed to be the Millennium City. There are glass towers, offices, apartment complexes and another construction site around practically every corner. From a distance, it looks like a city that has figured things out.
Then you try to walk somewhere. A proper footpath is still too much to ask for in a lot of places. When it rains, you get a fairly quick reminder of how much work the drainage needs. These are basic things, and living here makes it hard to ignore the gap.
I kept coming back to that. How does a place grow this fast and still make something as ordinary as walking down a road difficult?
Who do you even ask?
It's easy to complain about Gurgaon. Most of us have enough material. But after the complaint comes a much less obvious question: whose job is it to fix this particular road, footpath or drain?
Which civic body handles it? Who's the official responsible? Has money already been set aside for the work? Is there a tender somewhere that tells you what was supposed to happen? I wanted to be able to follow those questions past the usual shrug.
A lot of this information is public. Finding it, and working out how the pieces fit together, is a different matter. You can spend a surprising amount of time moving between portals and documents before you have anything useful to go on.
So I started building Nagrik.
The idea was fairly straightforward: put the public records in one place and make them easier to use. Find your ward. See the people responsible for it. Look at the public works around you, what they cost and where the information came from.
I wanted a resident to be able to look something up without first learning how every department organises its website. If you're asking about a broken drain, that's already enough of a problem to be dealing with.
The source matters to me. Every useful answer should give you something you can check. If a record isn't available, Nagrik should say so. A confident answer made up to fill an empty space would make the whole thing pointless.
I'm still figuring it out.
I'm an engineering student building something I wish I could use as a resident. Nagrik has given me a reason to learn how civic systems work alongside the software, and there is plenty left to learn in both.
A website won't fix a footpath. But being able to find the responsible person and the record of a promised repair feels like a useful place to start. It gives a question somewhere to go.
That's what I want Nagrik to be useful for. The next time someone looks at a flooded street and asks who is supposed to do something about it, I'd like the answer to be easier to find.
Thanks for reading,
Vyom Bhatnagar