OnTheGo — civic tech in 36 hours at MobileSparks
An Android app that lets citizens snap a photo of a civic problem and tag the responsible legislator. Built at MobileSparks 2015 in Bengaluru with two friends and a lot of caffeine.
In August 2015, YourStory ran MobileSparks in Bengaluru — a mobile-first hackathon under the theme “Make For India”. Three of us — me, Vinay Venu and Prasanna Venkatraman — built an Android app called OnTheGo.
The idea
Indian government had just launched the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (“Clean India Mission”). Lots of citizens were complaining about civic issues — overflowing bins, broken pavements, stagnant water — but the complaints went into a void. There was no feedback loop, no accountability for the politicians who were supposed to act on them.
OnTheGo flipped that loop:
- You see something broken on the way home.
- You snap a photo.
- The app tags it with location and routes it to the elected representative responsible for that area.
- The complaint becomes a public, time-stamped record on that politician’s “wall.”
- Resolution is tracked. Politicians who fix things look good. Politicians who don’t, don’t.
The app rode on the rails Swachh Bharat had already laid down (citizen-side momentum, publicity) and added the missing accountability layer.
What we shipped in 36 hours
| Component | Tech |
|---|---|
| Mobile app | Native Android |
| Auth | Facebook Login |
| Geo-tagging | Google Maps API |
| Backend | Parse (RIP) |
| Image hosting | Cloudinary |
| Push & realtime | Firebase |
| Storage | AWS S3 |
The repo’s build instructions are still up at github.com/intrepidkarthi/OnTheGo — though by now most of those credentials are revoked or those services renamed.
What I’d build differently in 2026
Three things age poorly in a 2015 civic-tech app:
- Centralized stack. Parse died. Today this whole thing belongs on Supabase or Cloudflare D1 with Workers. Spin-up time would be 4 hours, not 36.
- No verifiability. A 2015 photo + GPS could be faked. In 2026 you can hash + timestamp on a public chain (cheap on Polygon/Base) — citizens get a tamper-proof receipt, politicians can’t quietly delete unflattering posts.
- No model layer. Today the photo classifier should auto-tag the issue (pothole / garbage / waterlogging), the location mapper should resolve to the correct ward and councillor, and a small LLM should summarize the open-vs-closed scoreboard for each politician monthly. None of that needed humans.
The product idea is, if anything, more relevant now than it was then. The execution rails just got a thousand times better.
What hackathons taught me that work didn’t
I’ve now done 18 of them. Hackathons train a specific muscle:
The only feature that matters is the one you can demo in 90 seconds.
You will overbuild. You will under-design. You will lose 3 hours to an SDK that worked yesterday. The teams that win don’t have more talent — they have a brutal ranking of “what would actually appear on a screen during the demo,” and they cut everything else.
That muscle has been more useful in 12 years of CTO work than any architecture textbook.
Source repo: intrepidkarthi/OnTheGo. Demo deck and screenshots are in internal/ — happy to share.