Mumbai residents have designed a mobile app – and enlisted the help of tiny superheroes – in their campaign to repair the city’s notoriously ramshackle roads

Batman’s car may be stuck in a rut, Superman may look bewildered, but they might yet save the city.

India’s potholes are legendary. Bicycles and rickshaws disappear into them. Cars change gear to haul themselves out of them. Some are such well-known landmarks that they are used to help drivers negotiates the country’s teeming cities. Others are named after local politicians. This month is officially “pothole-filling month” in the city of Bangalore.

And every year, the potholes kill. Some by drowning, as in the case of 48-year-old P Gunasekaran, who died after tripping and falling on his face in a sludge-filled pothole in Mandavelli, Chennai. Others simply by causing pile-ups. In Mumbai this summer, 1,500 complaints were registered on the municipal website in 10 days. One recent survey said the country’s cities needed around £640bn worth of investment.

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Pothole Watch is a new app being developed by Mumbaikers with crowdsourced funding. It allows the long-suffering residents of India’s commercial capital to take a picture of a pothole, tag it with GPS data and make sure its location is sent to the relevant municipal agency which should, in theory, then go and fix it. Rupesh Mandal, 32, an independent creative director in Mumbai and a member of the Pothole Watch team, says: “We were trying to find a solution to this problem by crowdsourcing responsibility and accountability to the people of Mumbai. The power to bring change is in every one’s hands, literally. This tool is a bridge between the citizens and the authorities.”

A website allows residents to contribute pictures – largely humorous – of their favourite potholes. Some shoot superheroes, bemused, at the brown water’s edge (“The superheroes were about filling the potholes with stories,” says Mandal). Others prefer Lego fishermen or boatmen. There are rescue helicopters hovering and an elegaic origami boat floating in the sludge. And there are jokes (“How do you make banana milkshake? Step 1. Drink a glass of milk. Step 2. Have a banana. Step 3. Go on an auto rickshaw ride and let Mumbai potholes do the rest.”) “We human beings are very selfish so we are very bothered only about the pothole next to our homes,” Mandal adds, “but if everyone is selfish like that the whole city is taken care of.”

And a group of intrepid frogmen

There are other similar ventures around the country. “The Ugly Indian” is a movement of anonymous cleaners and tidiers who, without argument or anger, head out on to streets to make them less filthy. Then there is anti-corruption website Ipaidabribe.com.

So far two-thirds of the £1,200 budget for the Pothole Watch app has been raised. If it works in Mumbai, it will be rolled out to other cities. Probaby along with the superheroes.