TerraFlow
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TerraFlow is a non-profit, open-source environmental accountability platform. Every citizen report, water test, and air reading routes into a public record that authorities cannot quietly ignore. Built in Srinagar. Answering to you.
reports routed
0
resolved within SLA
0%
wards covered
0
verifiers trained
0
news desks CCd
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investors
0
Every feature we ship, every hire we make, every grant we accept has to answer “yes” to all three. When it doesn’t, we cut it.
The first complaint has to matter — not the hundredth, not the one filed by a journalist. Every report gets the same cryptographic timestamp, the same public feed, the same SLA.
An SLA without a counter is a suggestion. When a ward officer misses their window, the visible counter starts and does not stop. Accountability is a timer, not a memo.
The truth of what happened, and what was done about it, cannot live on our server alone. Every report, every response, every resolution is CC-BY open data.
To route every citizen environmental complaint in India through a public, time-stamped, CC-licensed record — so that inaction becomes visible, and visible inaction becomes untenable.
In the monsoon of 2023, a thirty-year-old chinar near Nehru Park, Srinagar, was cut down at four in the morning. Neighbours filed complaints to three offices. Nothing moved.
Four months later, when the monsoon ended, the same crew came back for the rest of the row. The complaints had entered a drawer. The drawer had a lock. The lock had a key. The key was with someone who did not want to find it.
We could not find a technology. So we built the receipt.
TerraFlow began because we wanted the first complaint to matter. Every report is now time-stamped, GPS-verified, photographed, and broadcast to a public feed the moment it is filed. Ward officers are pinged within sixty seconds. If SLA lapses, a visible counter starts.
Today TerraFlow covers 35 wards in Srinagar, pilots in Delhi and Bengaluru, a Ladakh expansion in scoping, and an open integration with the Central Pollution Control Board’s data feed.
Not aspirations. Not values-deck material. Hard commitments written into our bylaws, enforceable against us by any citizen with a lawyer.
Every submission produces a public cryptographic hash. Authorities cannot claim they "never received" what has a timestamp and a CC to fourteen news desks.
All code is AGPL-3.0. All data is CC-BY. All APIs are free for researchers and journalists. There is no gated enterprise tier — ever.
We do not track location outside a report. We do not sell data. We do not run ads. We have committed to never will, in writing, in our bylaws.
A report filed in a boat in the middle of Dal Lake with no signal is still a report. It syncs when it can, and the original timestamp is preserved.
Verification requires three independent citizens. Their usernames are on the public record. Resolution requires a confirming photo — also public.
Our board must be at least 60% non-governmental. Our ward-officer console is a window, not a dashboard they can hide behind.
A small core team across four cities, backed by a trained citizen verification network. We hire slowly, explain every decision in writing, and publish our salary bands on the careers page.
“If the paper trail can be ignored, make the paper trail public.”
Former environmental lawyer. Led 23 NGT petitions over 7 years, won 14. Writes our strategy, signs our bylaws, answers every press call personally.
“The report filed with no signal is the most important one.”
Ex-ISRO satellite communications. Wrote the offline-sync layer on a houseboat in Dal Lake with no signal for three days. Reviews every PR himself.
“I spent nine years on the inside. I know exactly where the silence hides.”
Former ward officer, now builds the verification network across 35 wards. Knows exactly where bureaucratic silence hides because he used to file it.
Drafted three of the SLA amendments now in our operating model. Runs the Friday public dispatch and the quarterly ledger.
Runs verifier training workshops. Has personally onboarded 2,100 citizens. Keeps the verification backbone of the platform humming.
Built the ward-officer SLA model and the weekly public audit pipeline. Every model he ships has to survive Right-to-Information requests.
Previously at Dalberg Design. The reason this interface is not a slog. Designs the report composer and the ward-officer console.
Liaises with CPCB, state pollution boards, and fourteen news desks. Every routed report has a newsroom recipient because of him.
Leading our Ladakh expansion with a focus on glacial health monitoring and high-altitude air quality. First hire outside the founding city.
Writes the weekly dispatch. Former environment reporter at The Hindu. Decides what language a twelve-year-old and a High Court judge will both understand.
Keeps the lights on. Runs the volunteer rota across three cities, the expense ledger, and the compliance calendar. Makes the spreadsheet that runs the movement.
Pro-bono counsel. Represents citizen reporters facing retaliation, for free. Builds the legal shield around the verification network.
Bands are public. No whiteboard interviews. We explain every decision in writing.
A plain-language summary of the week: new reports, resolutions, breach counters, and what we learned. Delivered to 11,400 inboxes and our RSS feed. Never paywalled.
Finances, salary bands, grant usage and programme costs, down to the category. Published on GitHub as CSV + an annotated PDF. Audited annually by CA Narayan & Partners.
What shipped, what broke, what we rolled back. Every line of production code is on GitHub under AGPL-3.0. Community PRs are triaged weekly on a public call.
Neighbourhood complaint chain collapses. Prototype sketched on a napkin.
Lal Chowk, Rajbagh, Hazratbal. 142 reports in month one.
The boat-in-the-middle-of-Dal-Lake story. PWA with background queue.
All 35 wards onboarded. First SLA breach counter goes viral.
Code open-sourced. The CPCB feed integration begins.
Karol Bagh and Dwarka. First cross-city verifications routed.
Koramangala onboards; Leh team begins glacial health monitoring.
8,419 reports, 73% SLA compliance, zero investors.
The receipt-driven accountability model TerraFlow pioneered is quietly reshaping civic tech in the subcontinent.
For the first time, a missed SLA has a public counter. It is changing ward-level politics in Srinagar.
Open-source, offline-first, and unapologetic. The stack deserves a look.
The verification network is the most interesting crowdsourcing experiment in Indian civic tech this decade.
TerraFlow operates on philanthropic grants and public-interest donations. Our full ledger is published quarterly. We have never taken corporate sponsorship that could compromise reporting on a polluter.
“No funding source may exceed sixty percent of annual revenue. No funder may hold board voting rights. No polluter may fund us. Ever.”