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This Bengaluru Man Is Offering Rs 1Cr to Solve This Citywide Nightmare
It was a late Saturday night in Bengaluru. The roads weren’t supposed to be packed. Yet, an 11 km drive turned into a 2-hour-and-15-minute crawl. At one point, the vehicle barely moved for 100 minutes. There was no traffic light. No traffic police. No explanation. For many, this would be just another reason to rant or laugh at a meme. But for Prashant Pitti, co-founder of EaseMyTrip, that traffic jam turned into a personal mission. Not a symbolic one — he’s backing it with ₹1 crore of his own money.
What is the Whole Story?
Prashant isn’t proposing more tweets or trending hashtags. Instead, he’s calling for a city-scale, data-driven solution powered by AI, Google Maps, and satellite imagery. The goal? To scientifically identify Bengaluru’s worst traffic choke points — not just where, but when — and give authorities the exact information they need to act.
The project’s backbone is a dataset called Road Management Insight, released by Google Maps in April 2025. This new dataset, made available via BigQuery, shows how traffic moves across a city throughout the day, down to street level. It’s meant for city governments and planners. But in this case, a private citizen wants to use it to help fix his city.
Lot of you have shown very keen interest in helping, thanks!
— Prashant Pitti (@ppitti) July 14, 2025
Please fill this form, my team will get in touch in coming week. Lets make this change happen, one way or another!https://t.co/pK4GdpGKam
Prashant’s plan is to fund 1–2 senior machine learning engineers, pay for Google Maps API usage, license satellite imagery, and cover infrastructure costs like GPUs for data processing. But he’s set one condition before starting: Bengaluru’s traffic department (BTP) or BBMP must open up their raw feeds or APIs, and appoint a team that will act on the insights generated.
Why It Matters?
Bengaluru’s traffic is more than a joke — it’s an economic and mental health cost. India’s IT capital loses thousands of hours of productivity every day to poorly managed intersections, inconsistent road widths, and vehicles stuck in bottlenecks that repeat daily. Some drivers avoid peak hours. Others shift to remote work. But none of this solves the core issue: we don’t know where the traffic is building up, why, and at what times — at scale.
According to TomTom’s Global Traffic Index, Bengaluru has regularly ranked among the top 10 most congested cities in the world and 2nd in India. Fixing this isn’t about building new roads overnight. It’s about optimizing the roads we already have — and using real-time data to make intelligent decisions.
That’s what Prashant is aiming for: accurate, location- and time-specific identification of the city’s choke points. Not guesses. Not assumptions. Verified insights backed by satellite-level tracking.
The Public Has a Mix Response
His post, shared on Twitter, sparked a wave of responses. Many citizens applauded the effort. Some volunteered to help. Others offered ideas — from rethinking signal timings to redesigning intersections and controlling entry of certain vehicles during peak hours.
Real Example for choke points :
— TheLassiLeaksIndia (@thelassileaks) July 15, 2025
“I spent 1 hour at Bellandur ORR junction. No cop. No signal. Here’s a screenshot from Google Maps and a photo. This happens every night after 8 PM.”
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Share the map and citizen reports… pic.twitter.com/NhEGmrtrAL
Not everyone agreed on AI’s role. One user mocked the initiative, asking, “Why bring AI/ML into everything?” But such comments reflect a broader skepticism that comes from years of civic tech promises that failed to deliver. This initiative, however, is rooted in open-source tools and proven datasets — and seeks collaboration, not disruption.
