BWSSB’s tanker booking system was opaque — residents paid, tankers didn’t arrive, complaints vanished. Two engineers built a bot that gives every complaint a public, ward-wise ID. It has been used 11,400 times.
During the 2024 water crisis, tanker booking in Bengaluru broke down completely. BWSSB’s helpline routed calls to sub-divisional offices that lost track of complaints. Payments were made informally. There was no way to say, “my complaint is number 4,127 in ward 174.”
We built a Telegram bot in a weekend. Residents send their address, category, and photo of the empty tank. The bot assigns a public complaint ID, geotags it to a ward, and posts an anonymised entry on a public dashboard.
Why it worked: the bot did not replace BWSSB. It made the complaint pipeline visible. Once ward-wise complaint counts were public, response time changed. Within three months, the median resolution time dropped from 9 days to 34 hours.
The source code is on GitHub, MIT licence. Any city can fork it. We have offered it to two other municipal bodies. Fork, translate the strings, hook up your local escalation matrix, and go.