Vehicred: Pune Techie's AI Platform To Offer Cash Rewards For Reporting Traffic Violations

Ninaad Pai, a Pune-based entrepreneur, has launched Vehicred, an AI-backed platform that allows citizens to flag traffic violations while offering them cash rewards. The platform uses artificial intelligence to detect vehicle license plates and identify traffic violations from crowd-sourced photographs, while offering incentives of around Rs 100 to 500 to users when enforcement agencies take action against violators. 

Speaking to the Free Press Journal, Pai explained, “Born and brought up in Pune, I've witnessed the rapid urbanisation and associated challenges such as vehicular congestion, rising traffic violations, traditional enforcement methods, and limited traffic police personnel. So I thought to step further, not just limiting myself to posting such violations on social media, but attempting to address the matter more effectively through an AI-backed vehicle scoring platform.” 

With this inspiration, Pai designed a website, www.vehicred.com, as the project's first phase with an automated traffic enforcement ecosystem. It is a crowd-sourced platform where citizens can post photos of traffic violations, and the AI automatically detects license plates and identifies the nature of violations. 

“After posting the violation's photograph on the website, the system generates a detailed report. When the police take action against violators, users receive cash incentives ranging from Rs 100 to 500,” said Pai. 

“The platform's name ‘Vehicred’ was also decided keeping in mind that, along with improving road safety and creating a traffic violation database, the crowd-sourced platform also generates revenue opportunities for citizens who flag violations,” added Pai. 

Unlike the VahanScore platform, where users have to update the vehicle's complete data manually, Vehicred has made the reporting hassle-free, where the data of the vehicle registration is automatically generated and includes the option to verify and modify in cases of blurry photos before final submission of the complaint.   

“Starting operations in Pune and Bangalore from mid-July, we aim to develop this platform to gradually integrate with RTO databases, AI-enabled cameras for instant challan generation, and a smart recovery system through vehicle renewals. The pending fines will bring restrictions on FASTag-based fuel purchases and impact credit scores for repeat offenders,” explained Pai. 

"We are currently in the waitlist phase to estimate market response and have been utilising this period to develop the platform. The first 100 waitlist members will receive founder rewards worth Rs 2,000, including premium features and priority access," said Pai.  

Moreover, to address the rising menace of fancy and sometimes missing vehicle number plates, Vehicred uses machine learning algorithms trained on Indian license plates and image processing from multiple angles to identify vehicles.