CivicLens Maharashtra

Inspiration

Everyday civic issues like potholes, overflowing garbage, broken streetlights, and damaged public spaces can affect entire neighbourhoods. Yet reporting these problems and making them visible to the wider community isn't always easy.

We wanted to explore how technology could make civic participation simpler and help communities bring attention to the problems around them. That idea inspired CivicLens Maharashtra.

What it does

CivicLens Maharashtra is a community-driven civic issue reporting platform. Citizens can report local problems, upload photos, view community reports, comment, and support issues that matter to them. By bringing reports together in one digital space, the platform aims to make neighbourhood concerns easier to discover and follow.

How we built it

We designed CivicLens with a user-friendly interface and a backend powered by Supabase. The platform is being developed to support community reporting, report discussions, and voting, with a focus on making participation accessible.

Challenges we faced

One key challenge was connecting the frontend to a shared backend while supporting guest participation. We worked on the database structure and access policies to enable reporting features without requiring every visitor to create an account.

What we learned

This project helped us understand how frontend design, database management, access policies, and deployment work together in a real-world application. It also reinforced the importance of building technology around actual community needs.

What's next

We hope to improve CivicLens with better report tracking, map-based issue discovery, AI-assisted categorization, and ways to help citizens identify relevant civic authorities. Our goal is to make local problems more visible and community participation easier.