Amid allegations of duplicated road works, poor inter-departmental coordination and scrutiny of more than Rs 50 billion (bn) spent on Bengaluru roads, a digital initiative conceived over a decade ago has been revived as a potential accountability tool. The Road History Project aims to record who carried out works, their costs and the exact road locations. The revival follows criticism of annual pothole filling and repeated excavations. The concept was developed by former Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) Taxation and Finance Committee Chairman Manjunath Raju and featured in the 2014–15 BBMP budget as an online geographical information system that would assign each road a permanent identification number and log related work. Raju promoted a data-driven approach to civic administration to improve transparency and planning. Under the initiative, drains, underground cables and other civic assets were to be digitally mapped to create a comprehensive asset database. The mapping was intended to enable tracking of unauthorised cutting by optical fibre companies and excavation by parastatal bodies without a BBMP permit, including the Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board (BWSSB) and Bangalore Electricity Supply Company (BESCOM). The project gained fresh attention after Bengaluru Development Minister Krishna Byre Gowda criticised Greater Bengaluru Authority (GBA) officials and engineers over the annual pothole filling exercise and cautioned against practices that yielded repeated bills for the same work. Activists and campaigners have urged authorities to operationalise the platform to link records of allocations, reported potholes and repairs to unique road identifiers. Critics say the concept was never fully implemented and allege that unscrupulous engineers, in collusion with contractors, raised overlapping bills for asphalting identical stretches. They contend that a functioning Road History Project would strengthen accountability, reduce duplication and limit opportunities for malpractice, if integrated into urban asset management and maintenance planning.