Every time we navigate around a pothole on India's roads, swerving our two-wheelers at the last second or bracing ourselves for that familiar jolt in our cars, we go through the same mental routine. We curse under our breath, wonder why the roads are so terrible, ask ourselves why nobody fixes these things, and then resign ourselves to the reality that nothing will change.

But for 15-year-old Parth from Delhi, that familiar cycle of frustration took a different turn. When potholes stopped being an abstract annoyance and became something that directly affected his family, the helplessness transformed into urgency, and the complaints into action.

It was supposed to be a happy occasion. Parth's parents had travelled to Agra to celebrate his grandfather's anniversary, spending the day surrounded by family and memories. But their journey home that evening turned what should have been a joyful day into something far more frightening.

Riding back on their motorcycle through the darkness, they struck an unfinished construction site jutting out from the road. His father lost control, and they fell.

"Thankfully, it wasn’t a major accident, but it did awaken a calling inside me that I really needed to do something about this," Parth recalls.

That internal fire would eventually become Project Sadak, a citizen-driven platform that is accomplishing what seemed impossible: actually getting potholes repaired, and doing it faster than the government systems designed for exactly that purpose.

When personal experience meets technical skill

Parth isn't spending his Class 11 year at Saint Francis School in Delhi the way most teenagers do. While managing physics, chemistry, mathematics and computer science coursework, he's also preparing to present a research paper at the Society for Study of Artificial Intelligence in the UK this July.

His academic interests lean heavily towards artificial intelligence and computer science, the kind of abstract, future-focused work that impresses university admissions committees.

But it was something far more immediate that redirected those technical skills towards solving a problem he could see, touch and witness firsthand. Once he started researching the scope of India's pothole problem, retreat became impossible.

Approximately 20,000 people die annually in India from pothole-related accidents. These weren't just statistics. They represented real people, real families and real lives disrupted by infrastructure failures that everyone accepts as inevitable.

He did what any frustrated citizen might do first: he checked what systems already existed. The Municipal Corporation of Delhi has an app where people can report potholes. Parth downloaded it, tested it, filed reports and waited.

"It takes a lot of time. In many cases, it takes three to four months before you get a reply," he discovered. "By the time authorities respond to a pothole report, the monsoon may have made it worse, or more accidents may already have occurred."

The gap between what existed and what was needed became impossible to ignore. Government systems weren't failing because the technology didn't exist. They were failing because of a lack of urgency, absent accountability and broken follow-through.

In January 2026, Parth sat down at his computer and started building what he wished had existed.

Building a platform from scratch

Project Sadak began with Parth writing code alone, line by line, teaching himself what he........

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