Purposeful Hackathon ( Tranforming the capital )

Let's Bring Delhi ALive — My Environmental Hacks Story

It all began around September. A random post turned into one of the coolest experiences of my 2026.

WeMakeDevs and Kunal were coming to India for the Bharat Builds Tour. At first I thought it was just another event with tickets and talks. The more I looked into it, the more surprised I became. It wasn't just an event. It was a hackathon. And the deeper I went, the clearer it became that this was a journey. More than that, it was a purpose.

A purpose that brought this Delhi boy back to his own city, alongside hundreds of students with the same ambition: to build something meaningful for the environment.

Yes, I'm talking about Environmental Hacks.

Why Air

Growing up in Delhi, you almost start believing you were born with built-in protection against pollution. But as I grew older, so did the smog. Someone needed to take the initiative, and all it took was a spark. WeMakeDevs brought that spark back to the curious kid in me.

So I asked myself a simple question: can software actually make a real difference for the environment?

I chose the one thing every Delhiite fights every single winter. Air.

Let's bring Delhi ALive.

The Problem No App Was Answering

Every morning we check one number: the city's AQI. But that number represents the city's air, not yours.

Two people in the same city can breathe completely different air depending on which road they take, what time they leave, and how long they wait at a signal behind a bus. A standard AQI app tells you the city is "Very Poor." It doesn't tell you what the drive to college just did to your lungs, or that the road one turn away would have been cleaner.

Nobody was answering the simple question: what did this air do to me today, and what should I do next?

Meet ALive

ALive is a lightweight, open-source app for everyone who lives, travels, stays, eats, plays, and sleeps in Delhi. Think of it as a dosimeter in your pocket. It doesn't just tell you what you're breathing in. It tells you what it costs you.

Air where you stand
It shows AQI, PM2.5, and PM10 for the exact spot you're standing on, not a monitor five kilometres away.

From place A to place B, the purest way
Before you leave, ALive compares routes based on how much smoke you'll breathe. Because health isn't the only thing that matters (budget and time count too), you can choose a mode:

Health Maxer — the road where you breathe the least smoke
Petrol + Health — the thriftiest road that is still clean
Time + Health — the fastest road that is still clean
You choose what suits you. If one road genuinely wins across the board, the app simply says so. No forced differences.

Real navigation and a receipt at the end
ALive navigates you with real GPS. When you arrive, you get a small receipt: how much you breathed, where you got stuck, and which stretch contributed the most smoke.

Air Around Me
Your streets, coloured by their air quality. Tap any spot or search for one to see the current AQI and the best time of day to step out, play with friends, or go for that evening walk.

Purest places and hotels
Find the cleanest spots near you, or check the air quality around a hotel before you book it.

And there's no sign-up. You open it, and it works.

The Build

The idea was good, but the journey of building it was even better.

On 8 October I opened my laptop and fired up my AI agents to brainstorm. The next time I looked at the clock, it was midnight. I slept, woke up, and found myself on the laptop again. In what felt like no time, I was at DTU.

I set one rule for the entire build: no fake numbers. Every number on the screen had to come from a real measurement, and you should be able to trace where it came from. If the data isn't available, the app says so. It never invents one.

That rule made everything harder. It's also the reason I'm proud of what we built.

What Fought Back

Every project has its challenges. Here are the ones that fought back the hardest:

My laptop lied about where I was. Laptops often guess location from Wi-Fi, and that guess can be kilometres off. Now ALive marks rough locations as approximate, and on phones it uses real GPS that keeps refining.

The same road showed two different travel times (42 minutes in one mode, 82 in another). Live traffic was timing out, and the app quietly fell back to an empty-road estimate. Now every mode waits for the real live time, so the same road shows the same time everywhere.

The three mode cards looked identical. Now each card leads with its own number (smoke breathed, litres of petrol, or live minutes) and clearly shows the real trade-off against the other two.

The map data had junk in it. A hotel pinned three kilometres away from its actual location. A printing shop named "Cyber Hub" ranking above the real Cyber Hub. We fixed it with ranking rules instead of hardcoding names.

Maps went blank on some laptops whose browsers block the graphics a modern map needs. Phones were fine. Teaching ALive to draw a proper map even on those laptops is what I'm still working on.

Old versions kept showing up after updates because of caching. Now the app's code is never served stale.

The home card used to show your exact doorstep the moment you opened the app. Now "You are here" stays blurred until you tap it.

There was also a form asking for your vehicle's year. Who even remembers that? Gone. Picking a vehicle is now two taps.

Under the Hood (The Light Version)

Air data comes from government monitors (CPCB and DPCC), plus OpenAQ, WAQI, and a weather-and-air model. Every 15 minutes we rebuild one live air map of Delhi-NCR. It leans with the wind because smoke travels.

Places and roads use our own index of Delhi places with spelling variants built in (mandir or temple, masjid or mosque), Ola Maps and Mappls for search, TomTom for live traffic and jams, India Post's DIGIPIN to pin a spot down to a few metres, and OpenStreetMap for the map itself.

AWS runs the API and routing engine as containers on ECS Fargate in Mumbai, behind CloudFront. CodeBuild builds every release and ECR stores it. Secrets Manager keeps every API key out of the code. S3 holds the air history, and DynamoDB keeps the app's anonymous counters.

The app itself is a light web app built with plain JavaScript and MapLibre, served from Vercel so it opens fast on any phone.

The Day at DTU

This was the peak moment.

More than 700 builders and students filled the hall, and the energy gave me goosebumps before anything had even started. Then came the man on stage, the man behind all of this — the OG @kunalstwt — along with the entire AWS team. And then the trio: @piyushgarg_dev, @SaiyamPathak, and Kunal himself. I even got to ask them a question, and their answer changed how I see the developer world.

All of it happened in such a short time, yet it feels like a huge chapter of my life. WeMakeDevs, you have already won me over. I've already signed up for Graphs Hacks.

And to the AWS team: you were wonderful. One of the AWS mentors showed me such a big vision for ALive that I still can't fully believe how much impact one piece of software can create.

What's Next

Maps that open properly on every laptop. Broader coverage across NCR, including smaller places. And for the full technical breakdown and architecture, I'm releasing a video soon.

Try it: https://delhi-is-alive.vercel.app/app/
The code is open: https://github.com/GC-WORK11/ALive
WeMakeDevs: https://www.wemakedevs.org/

Delhi can't choose its air today. But with ALive, you can choose how much of it you breathe.

Thanks,
With regards,
Govinda