Setu | Devpost

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Inspiration

Civic issues like potholes, garbage accumulation, and broken streetlights are common, yet reporting them is often confusing and time-consuming. Citizens rarely know where to complain, and authorities lack visibility into whether issues are actually resolved. This gap between citizens and governance inspired us to build SETU, a platform that simplifies reporting while enforcing accountability.

What it does

SETU is a unified civic issue reporting platform where citizens can report problems by uploading a photo or video, selecting the issue category, and confirming the location. Based on this information, the system automatically identifies the responsible municipal department and assigns the complaint to the appropriate officer based on jurisdiction.

SETU also tracks resolution timelines, collects citizen feedback after resolution, and generates transparent performance metrics for officers.

How we built it

We made a web app for frontend we used HTML,CSS,JS and for database we're using Firebase and Flask for backend, We built SETU as a prototype using a simple frontend for issue reporting and dashboards, along with a backend that handles complaint processing, categorization, and officer assignment. Rule-based logic is used for jurisdiction mapping, while AI-assisted tools were used to accelerate development, design workflows, and simulate issue classification.

Challenges we ran into

As beginners, we also faced challenges in integrating multiple components like image handling, location mapping, and dashboards within limited hackathon time. Balancing simplicity for users with meaningful performance tracking for authorities was another key challenge.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

we're very happy that we created the app prototype which is good enough to show what it's really for and we timely finished all 3 prospects though we will keep working on the app.

What we learned

Through this project, we learned how to break down real-world governance problems into technical components, design system workflows, and rapidly prototype solutions. We also learned how to effectively use AI tools as development accelerators while focusing on problem-solving and system design.

What's next for Setu

In the future, we plan to integrate real-time government data, improve AI-based issue classification, add duplicate complaint detection, and enable analytics dashboards for higher authorities. SETU can also be expanded to support smart city initiatives and large-scale urban governance systems.