Traffic Gaaye

Old Delhi has 30,000 free-roaming cows and some of the worst traffic in India. We didn't try to remove the cows — we put them to work. Traffic Gaaye turned the city's most unpredictable obstacle into its smartest navigation tool.

ProductDevelopmentMobileApplication

Services

Software Backend Development
Mobile Development
Hardware Design and Development

Tech Stack

Recycled Mobile Phones
Solar Power Cell
Google Traffic API
Android App

Client

VML Y&R - VideoCon

Timeline

4 weeks

Year

2016

01 / Challenge

Delhi's traffic problem had a very Indian cause.

Old Delhi's roads carry over 96 lakh vehicles across 33,198 km of road network — and roughly 30,000 sacred cows roaming freely among them. Cows are culturally revered and cannot be moved. They slow lanes, block junctions, and create unpredictable bottlenecks that no standard traffic app accounts for. The challenge was to find a solution that respected the culture while actually solving the problem.

A light brown goat with a collar stands on a bustling street, looking slightly upward.

A goat freely roams a crowded, narrow street, common in many urban areas where animals coexist with daily life.

02/ Idea

If you can't move the cows, track them.

Rather than treating the cows as an obstacle to work around, we made them part of the solution. By equipping cows with GPS-enabled collars, they became live data points — transmitting their position in real time and revealing the hidden lanes and gullies they naturally use to move through the city. Routes no map had ever captured. We then put that data directly in commuters' hands through a mobile app, letting them navigate with the cows instead of against them.

03 / Execution

Solar collars, recycled phones, and 6,000 km of new routes.

PixelPlusMedia designed the overall system architecture and built the Cowbell hardware — a transmitter collar housing a recycled smartphone powered by a solar charger. The phone's GPS tracked each cow's position in real time, feeding live data into the system. Mobiiworld developed the app and backend: the Traffic Gaaye app, published on Google Play under PixelPlusMedia, was built on the Google Maps open API — showing live cow locations, sending traffic alerts, and surfacing the hidden routes cows use to move through Old Delhi's oldest streets. The app went live on April 7th, 2016.

04 / Results

5,000 downloads. 15 minutes saved. One uniquely Indian solution.

Traffic Gaaye didn't just give people an app — it changed how they moved through the city. Commuters started following cow routes, discovering faster paths through streets that didn't exist on any other map. Congestion fell. So did fuel consumption and air pollution.

Results