Uber for water tankers, built for Bharat.
163 million Indians depend on tankers for water. The system is broken — no tracking, no transparency, no accountability. We rebuilt it.
Capstone · Jatin Sharma (GF202219717) · BTech CSE-DS Sem 8 · Mentor Dr. Abhishek Tomar
Phone the number. Pray it picks up.
An Indian family in a tier-2 town with no piped water. Mid-summer. Phone hopper-dialled across four supplier numbers; nobody picks up. The tanker promised at 11 AM never came. By evening, jerry-cans are empty.
No tracking
Customer never knows where the tanker is, or if it's even coming.
No accountability
If the driver bails, nobody knows. No rating, no consequence.
Cash & confusion
Pricing varies per call. Receipts are non-existent. Disputes are routine.
Three taps. Water at your door. Tracked end-to-end.
Voice ordering in 22 Indian languages. PWA-installable. Works on a 2GB phone over 3G.
Real-time, resilient, ridiculously cheap to run.
Firestore real-time
Customer's map updates the instant the supplier's phone pings GPS. No polling.
Coalesced writes
5-20 GPS updates merge into 1 Firestore write. Burns no quota.
Cloud Run, scale-to-zero
Idle cost: ₹0. First request spins instance up in seconds. India-region.
IAM-internal auth
Firebase Admin uses Cloud Run service account via ADC. Zero private keys in env.
Geohash spatial index
Find nearby suppliers in O(k) instead of O(n) scanning every supplier in country.
Haversine + Routes fallback
Sub-microsecond ETA via Haversine; Maps Routes API used only for polyline.
10% commission. That's the whole pricing page.
Customer pays
Surge-fair price visible up-front. UPI / Card / Wallet / COD.
Supplier earns
~90% of order value. Instant payout view. No middleman skimming.
Platform takes
10% per order. At 1,000 orders/day in one tier-2 town: ₹95K/day GMV → ₹9.5K/day revenue.
Government rural-water schemes (e.g. Jal Jeevan Mission) become channel partners, not competitors.
Start in one ward. Win it. Then the next.
- Wedge: one tier-2 town with chronic tanker dependence — pick 50 supplier numbers off Justdial, onboard 20.
- Hook: free first delivery for the customer; ₹0 onboarding for the supplier.
- Loop: WhatsApp share — "track your tanker" link makes neighbours ask "what's this?"
- Scale: RWA (Resident Welfare Association) partnerships replicate the loop across colonies.
Phone-and-pray is the incumbent. We're the alternative.
| Phone supplier | WhatsApp groups | Existing apps | JalSeva | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Live GPS tracking | — | — | Some | Real-time |
| Transparent price | — | — | Yes | Yes, w/ surge |
| Multi-language voice | Yes | — | — | 22 lang |
| UPI / receipt | — | — | Yes | Yes |
| Works on 2GB phone | N/A | Yes | Often no | PWA, <200 KB |
One engineer. One mentor. One AI build partner.
API endpoints. 4 surfaces: customer PWA, supplier dashboard, admin ops, WhatsApp bot.
< 1 ms
Haversine ETA, in-process, replaces blocking Maps calls on the hot path.
5-20×
Firestore write reduction via 500 ms coalescer on supplier GPS updates.
₹0 / idle hour
Cloud Run scale-to-zero. First request boots a fresh instance in < 5s.
Live now. Multi-device demo ready.
- Live: jalseva.dmj.one — Cloud Run, asia-east1, Firebase Phone Auth, Firestore real-time.
- Demo: 5 test phone numbers (no SMS billing). 1 customer phone + 1 supplier phone replays the full Uber-style flow.
- Next: ONDC/Beckn handshake so any aggregator app can order on JalSeva inventory.
- Next: WhatsApp-bot ordering in regional languages for low-literacy users.