JalMarg: A Way Beyond Water Obstacles 🌧️
I was heading to my internship in Noida on a rainy day when I experienced something that made me think differently about urban flooding.
It had been raining heavily, and the road I usually took was waterlogged. My daily route, which I travelled without thinking twice, suddenly became unpredictable. At one point, my four-seater car was at risk of getting stuck in rising water.
I remember wishing I had known about the situation earlier.
What if something could have warned me before I reached that road? What if I could have checked the waterlogging conditions and chosen a safer route in advance?
Then another thought crossed my mind. What if a system could recommend not just which road to take, but also help people understand whether their vehicle was suitable for the conditions?
Sometimes, taking a different route is not enough. You need to make the right decision before starting your journey.
That was where the idea of JalMarg began.
From a Personal Problem to a Bigger Purpose
When I discussed this idea with my team, we realised that waterlogging is not just an inconvenience. It disrupts daily commutes, affects businesses, damages vehicles, and can delay ambulances and other emergency services.
More importantly, people often have no reliable way to understand the severity of waterlogging ahead of them.
We decided to build JalMarg, an AI-powered urban waterlogging intelligence platform that aims to help people identify flooded roads, understand local risks, and find safer alternative routes.
But we wanted to make it more than another map.
Why 3D Makes a Difference
Most people are familiar with conventional 2D navigation maps. However, understanding flood conditions through symbols and coloured lines can be difficult, especially for people who are not comfortable reading maps.
With JalMarg, we are exploring 3D flood-risk visualisation to make road conditions more intuitive and easier to understand.
Our goal is to help children, older adults, and people with limited literacy understand potentially dangerous locations through visual cues rather than relying only on text.
By combining crowdsourced reports, weather information, route data, and AI-driven risk analysis, JalMarg aims to turn scattered information into something people can actually use when making travel decisions.
The idea is simple: people should not have to reach a flooded road to discover that it is unsafe.
Building JalMarg with My Team
Turning this idea into a working project has been a learning experience. We brought together mapping, backend development, weather data, route planning, and AI capabilities to create our platform.
We also deployed JalMarg on AWS, taking our work beyond a local development environment.
Building a solution for a real-world problem has taught us that technology is not just about adding more features. It is about understanding what people need at the moment they need it.
We are still working towards our larger vision, and there is much more we want to build.
A Future Where Navigation Speaks to Everyone
One of our future goals is to introduce voice-based navigation and alerts for people with visual disabilities.
Instead of depending entirely on a screen, users could receive spoken warnings about reported waterlogging, potential hazards, and safer route options.
We want JalMarg to become more inclusive, so that access to safety information does not depend on someone's age, literacy level, or ability.
Imagine receiving a warning before entering a flooded street, understanding the risk without struggling to interpret a map, or hearing an alert that helps you make a safer decision.
That is the kind of experience we hope to create.
Why the Name JalMarg?
In Hindi, Jal means water, and Marg means way or path.
For us, JalMarg represents more than a route through a flooded city. It represents finding a way forward when water becomes an obstacle.
The rainy journey that started this idea made me realise how easily an ordinary commute can become dangerous when information arrives too late.
With my team, I want to help change that experience.
JalMarg is our attempt to build a way beyond water obstacles, helping people make safer journeys, one route at a time.
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