DisasterSense
India's AI-powered disaster intelligence system
Created on 1st February 2026
•
DisasterSense
India's AI-powered disaster intelligence system
The problem DisasterSense solves
DisasterSense addresses a critical gap in disaster preparedness and emergency response by delivering real-time, AI-analyzed intelligence that helps save lives. The platform is designed to provide early situational awareness, safety assessment, and actionable guidance during emergencies, enabling both individuals and organizations to make faster and more informed decisions.
For citizens living in disaster-prone regions, DisasterSense functions as an early warning and safety support system. Users receive alerts about potential disasters detected through real-time news analysis, often before official warnings are issued. The system evaluates current safety levels by combining weather data, air quality information, seismic activity, and local news reports. During emergencies such as earthquakes, floods, or fires, users can consult an AI assistant for context-aware safety guidance. The platform also enables one-click SOS reporting, automatically capturing location data to assist responders, and allows users to quickly locate nearby hospitals, police stations, and fire departments.
For families and travelers, DisasterSense enhances safety planning and risk awareness. Users can assess disaster risks before traveling to cities in India or abroad, monitor safety conditions for loved ones in different locations, and receive AI-powered evacuation guidance when conditions worsen. The platform also ensures quick access to emergency contact services, including police, ambulance, and fire departments.
For emergency responders and organizations, DisasterSense provides real-time, AI-analyzed intelligence about ongoing disasters. Responders can access a database of SOS reports submitted by citizens, enabling better situational awareness and faster response. The system supports resource planning by showing risk levels across different regions and enables long-term trend analysis to understand disaster patterns and changing risk scores.
Compared to traditional approaches, DisasterSense significantly simplifies disaster monitoring and response. Instead of relying on multiple weather apps, manual news searches, and uncertain decision-making, users gain access to a unified dashboard that integrates multiple data sources. AI automatically filters and analyzes disaster-related news, provides location-based assistance, and delivers clear safety guidance. The platform also offers a digital channel for reporting emergencies, something that is often missing in conventional systems.
The system enhances safety through proactive intelligence rather than reactive response. By combining multiple independent data sources, it improves reliability and reduces misinformation. AI-driven analysis supports more informed decision-making, while offline-ready emergency information ensures users can still access critical contacts. Geolocation features help users find nearby assistance quickly during high-stress situations.
In real-world scenarios, DisasterSense can help citizens track flood risks during monsoon season, guide residents in earthquake-prone areas during tremors, warn people during severe air quality crises, assist travelers in assessing landslide risks in hill regions, and support accident victims through instant SOS reporting with precise location sharing.
Overall, DisasterSense centralizes disaster intelligence, reduces panic through clear guidance, improves emergency response with accurate location data, and enables earlier warnings through continuous news monitoring. By shifting disaster management from reactive response to proactive preparedness, it empowers citizens and strengthens emergency systems.
Challenges we ran into
During deployment, our application faced critical CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing) issues. While everything functioned correctly in the local environment, all API calls failed in production on Vercel and Render due to “Access-Control-Allow-Origin” errors. The root cause was that the backend CORS configuration allowed only a single origin (localhost:3000), which did not include our deployed frontend domain.
After extensive debugging, we resolved the issue by implementing a dynamic CORS whitelist on the backend. This allowed multiple trusted origins, including our production domain and *.vercel.app URLs used during deployment previews. In addition, we updated the frontend to use environment variables (process.env.REACT_APP_API_URL) for API endpoints instead of hardcoded localhost:5000 URLs, ensuring the correct backend service is used across development and production environments.
This fix made the system deployment ready, secure, and scalable across different hosting environments.
Tracks Applied (3)
Open Track
Fresher's Track
Agentic AI / ML
Technologies used
