Promise VS Progress: A Civic-Tech Platform for Tracking Government Infrastructure Projects in Karnataka
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Promise VS Progress is a civic-technology platform designed to address the persistent lack of transparency and accountability in government infrastructure project management across Karnataka, India. Despite annual budget allocations running into thousands of crores of rupees for roads, bridges, public utilities, and civic amenities, there exists no effective mechanism for citizens to independently track whether these promises are translated into actual on-ground progress. The platform takes a multi-layered technical approach to solve this problem. Data is collected automatically from official government portals and trusted news platforms. Three specialized AI agents power the core system: a Data Collection Agent that extracts structured project metadata using NLP, a Progress Monitoring Agent that compares planned versus actual timelines to auto-classify project status, and a Citizen Verification Agent that validates geotagged photo submissions using computer vision and image forensics. A React-based interactive dashboard presents this information via a district-level map. Citizen-submitted reports are anchored permanently on the Polygon blockchain, creating an immutable audit trail. The platform directly addresses five identified research gaps: absence of automated data consolidation, lack of AI-based delay detection, no citizen verification layer, no image authenticity check, and no blockchain-backed audit trail.
Authors: Sinha, Adarsh, Srivastava, Aditya, Singh Rathore, Devendra, Singh, Prajwal
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7162026004
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