Civic Issue Reporting System: A Mobile and Web-Based Platform for Citizen– Government Engagement

Abstract

Local governments across the world face persistent challenges in identifying and resolving everyday civic problems such as potholes, malfunctioning streetlights, overflowing garbage bins, water leakage, and damaged public infrastructure. Traditional grievance-redressal mechanisms — phone calls, physical visits to municipal offices, or paper-based complaint registers — are slow, opaque, and difficult to scale to the size of a modern city.
This paper presents the design and conceptual implementation of a Civic Issue Reporting System (CIRS): a mobile and web-based platform that allows citizens to report civic problems in real time using geotagged photographs and short descriptions, and allows municipal staff to triage, assign, track, and resolve those complaints through a centralized administrative dashboard. The proposed system combines a citizen-facing mobile/web application, a rolebased administrative back end, a relational database, and optional machine-learning components for automatic complaint categorization and duplicate detection. We describe the system architecture, database design, technology stack, and development methodology, and discuss the advantages, limitations, and future scope of such systems, including AI-based classification, IoT sensor integration, and multilingual accessibility.
Keywords— civic issue reporting, e-governance, grievance redressal system, smart city, complaint management, citizen engagement, mobile application, geotagging