SETU
A digital bridge between Gurukulam school staff and higher authorities. School staff report issues, track them in real time, and escalation happens automatically if officials don't respond — so no student welfare concern is ever lost in transit.
SETU (Smart Escalation & Tracking Utility) is an open-source, AI-assisted grievance reporting and escalation management system built for TGTWREIS Gurukulam schools — government-run tribal welfare residential institutions in Telangana, India.
The core problem SETU solves is a long-standing communication failure between school-level staff and the district and state officials who have the authority to act. When a water pump breaks, a dormitory roof is damaged, or a student safety concern arises, school staff currently file paper reports that pass through five administrative layers with no tracking, no accountability, and no feedback. What should take days takes months. Students — from some of India's most marginalized communities — live with the consequences.
SETU replaces this broken chain with a structured digital platform. School staff submit issues in under two minutes. An AI keyword classifier automatically assigns urgency. Officials receive instant notifications and work from a priority-ranked dashboard where older unresolved issues continuously accrue weight — so nothing is buried by newer arrivals. If an official fails to act, a five-stage human-first escalation ladder kicks in, culminating in automatic escalation to state-level administrators only after every human-opportunity stage has been attempted and failed.
The system includes structural safeguards against misuse: original reports are immutable, officials cannot silently close issues without school confirmation, cross-hierarchy visibility ensures state admins can always see every issue regardless of district-level inaction, and an anonymous bypass channel exists for headmasters who believe an issue is being deliberately suppressed.
SETU is grounded in real field research — stakeholder interviews and questionnaires conducted with headmasters, teachers, wardens, and district officials across TGTWREIS institutions. It is built entirely on an open-source stack (Next.js, Node.js, PostgreSQL, Docker) with no proprietary dependencies, and is designed to be self-hosted by any welfare school network in India at zero licensing cost.
The MVP is complete and targets pilot deployment in 3–6 Gurukulam schools during the Millennium Fellowship period (August–November 2026), with a goal of tracking 20+ real institutional issues and measuring a measurable reduction in response times versus the manual process.