What Getting Lost and Found Taught Me About Indian Cities

There is a particular kind of goodness that Indian cities are not given enough credit for. Not the organised, institutional kind. Not the kind that comes with a certificate or a receipt. The quiet, anonymous, no-big-deal kind the auto driver who runs after you because you left your bag on the seat. The office building guard who kept your umbrella for three days on the off chance you'd come back. The stranger on the Metro who taps your shoulder and points at the phone you nearly left on the bench. This happens constantly. In every city. Every day. We just do not have a way to talk about it clearly, because the system around it is so broken that most of these acts go nowhere.

The Rickshaw Driver in Pune Who Tried for Four Days

Pune, March 2024. A software professional named Kavya left her wallet in an auto-rickshaw after a late-night ride home from a colleague's birthday dinner. The wallet had her PAN card, her company ID, her ATM card, and about ₹800 in cash. The driver, Ramesh, found it when he cleared his auto at the end of the night. He had no way to reach her there was no number on the wallet, and the ride had been booked through an app whose customer support told him to drop the wallet at a police station. He waited instead. He carried it with him for four days, checking every fare to see if anyone mentioned a lost wallet. They never connected. Kavya got a new PAN card issued six weeks later. Ramesh eventually gave the wallet to the police, hoping someone would come. Nobody did. This story has a villain, and it is not Ramesh and it is not Kavya. The villain is the absence of a mechanism. Four days of effort, goodwill on both sides, and still nothing.

The Things We Leave Behind, and Where They End Up

Indian cities are extraordinary movers of people. The Mumbai Suburban Railway alone carries 7.5 million passengers daily more than the entire population of many countries. Delhi Metro handles over 6 million daily riders. Bengaluru's BMTC buses carry about 3 million. Each one of those journeys is a chance to leave something behind. A book. A charger. A bag. A phone slipped out of a pocket at a crowded station. The Indian Railways lost property database is one of the few public windows into what this looks like in aggregate. In 2022, over 40,000 items were processed by the network's lost and found offices. Fewer than 30 percent were claimed. The rest waited their thirty days and disappeared. Behind each unclaimed item is a Ramesh who tried, and a Kavya who never knew.

What Cities Owe Their Residents

There is a reasonable argument that the gap between willing finders and stranded owners is not just an inconvenience it is a civic failure. Cities ask their residents to move quickly, to be surrounded by strangers, to navigate complex shared spaces with minimal friction. In exchange, the implicit promise is that the systems which govern those spaces will work. The lost-and-found system, almost everywhere in India, does not fully work. It is under-resourced, under-digitised, and designed around a model of physical claims that made sense in a slower era. The thirty-day rule, the requirement for documentation, the reliance on you being in the same city none of this reflects how Indians actually move through their cities today. The informal workarounds WhatsApp groups, social media posts, word of mouth fill some of the gap. But they are not infrastructure. They are improvisation. They work sometimes, for some people, in some situations.

Small Things, Big Chains

The most interesting thing about lost-and-found stories is how often recovery happens not through official channels but through chains of strangers. Someone finds a bag and posts in a group. Someone else in that group knows someone who knows the owner. Someone picks up a dog and knocks on five doors before reaching the right one. These chains are evidence of something genuine that people in Indian cities are more connected by goodwill than the formal infrastructure suggests. The desire to do right by a stranger is real. It just needs something to work with. EkTag is designed to be that something. A tag on a bag means that the chain does not need to be long. The finder scans, the connection is made, the story ends well. No group needed. No luck required. The goodwill that was always there gets a direct line to act.

The City We Are Building, One Small Thing at a Time There is a version of India's cities that we are slowly constructing not through grand infrastructure alone, but through the accumulation of small systems that make daily life more reliable, more trustworthy, more human. UPI did this for payments. The Aadhaar-linked health record is doing it for medical history. The last-mile delivery networks are doing it for commerce. Each one took a problem that was large, distributed, and structurally broken, and solved it with a simple, universal tool. Lost belongings are a large, distributed, structurally broken problem. The tool to solve it is a QR tag that anyone can scan and nobody needs to download an app for. It fits in your pocket, on your keychain, on the inner lining of your bag. Every time a bag comes home because someone scanned a tag every time a dog finds his family because a child pointed her phone at his collar the city gets, by the smallest measurable amount, a little better than it was.

That is worth something. More than we account for. EkTag for the Rameshes and the Kavyas, and the connection that should have always been there.