QR boards at the site of a planned street change, with feedback reports
TL;DR Streetsay puts boards with QR codes at the exact spot where a city plans to change a street, junction or park. Residents scan, see the before-and-after on their phone and answer five questions in their own language. City agencies and their design consultants pay per project for a clean report of what people said.
Public input on Indian city plans arrives late and thin, through formats few people can use. Delhi gave residents 45 days to comment on a 20-year master plan running to hundreds of pages, and released its baseline studies a week before the deadline[1]. Bengaluru's draft 2031 plan met a lukewarm public response[2].
Smaller projects get even less. A footpath widening, a new bus bay or a junction redesign usually reaches residents as barricades. Pune's ITI Road was rebuilt as a smart street, and researchers later had to go back and ask users what worked[3]. Shopkeepers, vendors and daily walkers find out about a design after it's built, and then they complain or undo it.
The seed proposed AR-powered feedback. I kept the goal and dropped the headset. AR apps need downloads, newer phones and steady hands, which filters out exactly the people a street change hits hardest.
Streetsay works on any phone with a camera. For each project the team makes a before-and-after image set from the designer's drawings, seen from where the person is standing, plus a 60-second voice explanation in the local language. Weatherproof boards with QR codes go up at the site for two to four weeks. A scan opens the views and a short form - what do you use this street for, what worries you, what would you change. Volunteers with tablets cover people without smartphones, like vendors and older residents.
Responses get tagged by user group and by spot on the map. The agency gets a report showing what each group said, with quotes and counts, and a log of changes made in response, which it can show councillors.
Residents use it for free. The payer is the agency running the project, which could be a smart-city company, a municipal corporation's roads or urban design cell, or the design consultant hired for the job, who can fold it into the fee. Foundations funding street redesigns are a third buyer. I found no public Indian price for project-level consultation, so test pricing per project in the first sprint.
Indian cities have spent the past decade trialling street changes with cones and paint before building them, as WRI India documented in Mumbai and elsewhere[4]. Those trials need a cheap way to hear from people while the paint is still wet. And thanks to phone cameras and UPI, almost everyone already knows what to do with a code on a board.
There's no public figure for consultation work bought by Indian cities. Abroad the market is real. One engagement platform says hundreds of governments in more than 20 countries use it[5], and a larger rival, which bought a UK competitor, claims over 600 local governments[6]. Treat those as adjacent proof that cities pay for this, not as an Indian size.
MyGov runs national consultations online, but not site-based input on a city junction[7]. Online engagement platforms are the closest models abroad, selling online engagement platforms to councils[5][6]. NGOs and design firms in India run walkshops and paper surveys by hand. The gap is a low-cost, on-site, multilingual tool built for Indian street projects.
| Difficulty | Moderate (37/100) |
| Starting capital | ₹40–75 L |
| Time to launch | 4–6 months |
The software is simple. The hard parts are making believable before-and-after views quickly from rough drawings, reaching people without smartphones and keeping boards standing in public space for weeks. Selling is harder still, because you need an official who actually wants to hear criticism.
No sector licence applies to running feedback boards. The baseline plus a few permissions does the job.
Building this outside India? The categories above usually have a local equivalent, so check with your own regulator.
Don't let AI summaries replace reading the raw comments. A councillor will quote one, so a person checks every tag and quote before the report goes out.
Want to work out the AI layer for Streetsay? Talk to Yash →
I like this for an urban designer or civic-tech founder with friends in a smart-city company or a design consultancy. If you're expecting software margins then look elsewhere, because every project needs people on the street. First prove that one agency will pay for two projects and actually change a design because of what you report.
My estimate is ₹40–75 L, covering boards, the web app, a small field team and the first few pilots. The kit breaks it down.
No sector licence. You need written permission for each board site and DPDP Act consent notices for the phone numbers and opinions you collect.
Yes, and foreign engagement platforms already sell similar tools abroad. Check local rules on signs in public space and on resident data first.
The free Streetsay validation kit has the line-by-line capital breakdown, the effort scoring, the data-protection and planning-law checklist, a 14-day validation sprint with pass/fail targets, a 90-day launch plan, 10 interview questions for city officials and designers, and 5 assumptions to test. Download the kit →
Thinking about building Streetsay or something close to it? The make-or-break work is finding officials who will pay to hear criticism and reaching residents who never fill in forms, and I'm happy to work through both with you. If you need a hand, you know where to find me. Talk to Yash →
For illustration only. Names are fictional and ideas hypothetical; sourced facts are real but may be out of date. Nothing here is legal, financial or professional advice, and Yash Khatri is not personally liable for any use of it. Read the full disclaimer.