In July, Bengaluru Development Minister Krishna Byre Gowda encountered a familiar civic absurdity during a late-night inspection of the Outer Ring Road. A freshly asphalted service road had been dug up. When he asked who was responsible, officials could not initially establish which agency had carried out the excavation. BESCOM denied responsibility, and the possibility of an optical fibre cable company being involved was raised.
The episode exposed a problem Bengalureans know too well: one agency lays a road, another digs it up, and nobody seems to have a complete account of what happened.
The Minister subsequently called for a common GIS-based platform to map roads, underground utilities and planned civic works. In September, he also directed officials to introduce digital, time-bound contractor-bill processing linked to work progress.
Both are important steps. But Bengaluru has an advantage that should not be overlooked: the city had already built the foundation of a road-history system more than a decade ago.
As a corporator for ten years and Chairman of the BBMP Taxation and Finance Committee in 2011–12, I pushed for a simple principle: every public asset should have a unique identity, and every rupee spent on it should be traceable.
One road. One identity. One history.
Bengaluru’s road-history initiative mapped approximately 13,000 kilometres of roads and assigned unique identification numbers to individual stretches. Each number was linked to a specific location, irrespective of the street name used by different departments.
Behind that number was a record of the road’s length, work orders, contractor, sanctioned amount, completion details and defect liability period - the time during which the contractor is responsible for rectifying specified defects.
Consider a road that has been asphalted. Months later, another department proposes work on the same stretch. Without a common record, officials may not know when the road was last laid, how much was spent or whether the contractor is still responsible for its condition.
With a unique road ID, these questions become verifiable. The original system, developed on the GeoCivic platform, was also intended to connect road history with road-cutting permissions and the BBMP’s financial management system. The concept was sound. The challenge is to ensure that records are complete, updated and consistently used before work is approved and bills are paid.
2014 WeGO Award
Honored as the first ULB to receive the WeGO Best e-Government Prize under the Category of Efficiency for the pioneering GIS-enabled Road History program in Chengdu, China.
This was the first time the road history concept was implemented in India, and it was implemented under Mr G Manjunath Raju.
No more Hale Kallu, Hosa Bill (Old stone, New bill)
Imagine a road that has already been white-topped. A second tender is subsequently raised for the same work on the same physical stretch, perhaps under a different street name.
If the administration treats the two descriptions as separate roads, duplicate claims may escape detection. A common road ID would allow officials to check previous sanctions, completed works and payments before approving another tender.
In Karnataka, we have a phrase for this: hale kallu, hosa bill, old stone - new bill. A road ID will not eliminate corruption by itself. But it can make duplication harder to conceal. Every estimate, tender, work order, measurement book and bill should carry the same identifier. The financial system should flag overlapping work and prevent payment where the same work has already been paid for, unless a documented review establishes a legitimate reason.
The Minister’s recent push to link contractor payments to work progress provides an opportunity to make this connection mandatory.
What lies beneath the road?
The problem extends underground. BWSSB, BESCOM, gas companies and telecommunications providers maintain infrastructure beneath the same roads, often using separate records.
The CAG has documented weaknesses in Bengaluru’s underground utility mapping, including the use of outdated road maps. Inaccurate information increases the risk of damaged pipes and cables, repeated excavation and avoidable expenditure.
Every utility agency must map its infrastructure against the common road IDs, recording location and depth and updating the data whenever work is undertaken. Every road-cutting permission must be linked to the relevant ID, with restoration verified through geotagged photographs and inspection.
The city’s emerging GIS initiatives and AI-assisted road surveys can strengthen this system, but identifying a pothole is only the beginning. The record must also show who last worked on that stretch, what was paid, and who is responsible for fixing the defect.
Make the record public
Three changes are essential.
First, no road work should proceed through tendering and payment without a valid road ID. Second, every excavation, restoration and utility intervention must be recorded against that ID. Third, citizens must be able to search by road name or number and see the available work history, contractor, expenditure, guarantee period and cutting permissions.
New roads must receive IDs from the planning stage. Existing records must be updated, and gaps in the database must be identified and closed.
Bengaluru does not need to start again with another standalone platform. It needs to establish what its existing systems contain, connect them, enforce their use and open the resulting records to the public.
A road is not merely asphalt. It is a public asset built with taxpayers’ money. Citizens should not have to depend on informal enquiries to discover who laid it, what it cost or why it has been dug up again.
Every road should have a number. Every rupee spent on it should be traceable. And every citizen should have the right to know.
