This ex-Ola top guy has created an app that will tell you how good or bad the road you want to travel on is

A month back, Sudarshan Gangrade was heading marketing operations at Ola as Vice President. Gangrade wanted to take a break and quit his job.

One month after, Gangrade and his team built an app-Road MApp- for the betterment of the society, and their mission is to bring about a positive impact and affect lives of people.

“I was on a break and one day I was talking to my friends and then it struck me if could have an app that assess the quality of the roads,” said Gangrade.

What is the app, how does it work?

Road MApp assesses the quality of roads using the sensors in your smartphones. The app is developed by Ph.D holders and uses sophisticated algorithms and accelerometers to measure the quality of roads. A team at Bengaluru-based startup- Lightmetrics, which is into imaging technology- helped Gangrade in developing this app.

“You can download app on Android smartphones and once launched, it automatically knows you are on the road. The sensors assess the vibrations as you drive on good or bad stretches, records the location and a Google Maps-type image is generated that shows the quality of the road,” said Gangrade.

Road MApp grades at 7 levels how good or bad are the roads -Green means the roads are better and red means you have landed in a pothole.

How accurate is the app?

The beta testing of this Bengaluru-based Road MApp is over and the app has been tested on Bengaluru roads.

“It may not be 100 per cent accurate and we will fine tune it over a period of time but after field testing, we can say that the app is fairly accurate and is reliable,” said Gangrade.

For the government

The main aim of Road MApp is to collect data and hand it over to the government so that they have the real time data of roads to repair it.

“Road MApp is not for academic purposes. There have been lot of consumer campaigns about bad roads and I wanted to help the society at large. We are yet to speak with the government but once we have huge data, we will share it with them and we are confident, they will look at it in an electronic way and use it for repairs,” said Gangrade.

Future plans

Gangrade said the app was developed purely for social cause. In future, Gangrade plans to improve public delivery of services.

“The smartphone is a powerful tool and in future the app can be future developed and used in identifying accident-prone areas, blind spots in real time,” said Gangrade.

Saddest roads in Bengaluru

Since this app has been tested only in Bengaluru, Gangrade said Sarjapura and Bellandur really have bad roads.

His association with Nandan Nilekani

Gangrade has worked on the Aadhar project with Nilekani, who is also an inspiration to him.

“I am inspired by Nilekani’s idea of using technology to improve public delivery of services. My belief is that the government is open to using tools to help improve its efficiency,” said Gangrade.

“Technology will create an impact on the society,” Nilekani told Gangrade, who took his words seriously.