Live in Harnaut block · Nalanda, Bihar
A district is a market.It has never had the roads.
Every village wants what the block market sells. Every block market wants customers. What has never existed is the fifteen kilometres between them — reliable enough that a shopkeeper will promise it, cheap enough that a household will use it. We were already driving those kilometres.
It started as the shopping. It now carries a doctor who answers for ₹50, a household that cooks every day for the neighbour who lives alone, and the week a family plans for a year.
↑ drawn live from the production database — not an illustration
The missing middle
Never short of demand. Short of the distance.
A shop fifteen kilometres away may as well be in another state if getting there costs half a day's wage and the trip back is uncertain. So villages buy less, worse, and dearer — and the shopkeeper who could have served them never finds out they exist.
Every attempt to fix this has tried to build the market first and hope the logistics follow. We had the logistics already: an electric fleet, drivers on a battery subscription, running those exact roads every day. Metagaon is what happens when you put the market on top of a network that is already moving.
10 services, one network
What a village can actually do
One account, one fleet, one driver at the door. The services differ because the trades differ — a grocer prices as they weigh, a kitchen prices from a menu, a doctor is paid for answering the phone — and the system was built to respect that rather than flatten it.
The market
Buying and selling, in both directions — the block's shops and kitchens reaching the villages, and the village's farms, makers and workshops reaching everybody else.
Work and movement
Somebody to do the job, and something to carry it. The two things a village runs short of that are not goods at all.
Living here
The things that decide whether a village is somewhere a person can actually stay — a doctor, a household that is looked after, and the one week a family plans for a year.
Who it is for
It stopped being a shopping app when it started serving the people around the shopper
A marketplace has one customer: whoever is paying. A village does not work like that — the person who needs the help, the person who pays for it and the person who gives it are usually three different people, and often in three different cities.
A household
Shops fifteen kilometres away, a kitchen down the road, a maker in the next panchayat, vegetables on a standing order, a vehicle when it matters — one account, one wallet, one driver at the door.
Somebody living alone
Meals cooked every day by a household in the same village. A doctor for ₹50 without the morning it used to cost. A neighbour who will read a letter aloud or walk to the bank with you. And a visit from the Sahayak before a stranger is let into the house.
The child who left
Patna, Delhi or Dubai, sending money home and able to do nothing useful with it. Now: top up the wallet, arrange the meals, be told when one is missed — and only what a parent chose to share, which the parent can withdraw alone.
A neighbour with an hour free
Sixty-one kinds of small work, listed at a price they set, on the days they choose. Not a business, not a gig platform, not a rating out of five — a village that can pay itself for the things it was already doing for free.
Every one of those is held together by a rule rather than a promise: the person being helped holds the permissions, grants them one at a time, sees exactly what is shared, and can cut the link alone. Anything anyone does on their behalf is written down where they can read it. How Aangan handles that →
Why this is hard to copy
The fleet came first. That is the whole moat.
A marketplace can be built in a quarter. What cannot be assembled quickly is a fleet of electric vehicles already running a district's roads on a battery subscription, driven by people who live in the villages being served.
The drivers already had a reason to be there
Every agent is an e-rickshaw driver on DeepValley's battery service. They were driving those roads before Metagaon existed, and they are paid for deliveries that fit around the trade they already run — not recruited into a gig economy that has to subsidise them into existence.
The roads measure themselves
Every trip returns vehicle dynamics, energy draw and motion data. 598 km of road across 2,022 segments now carries a condition rating built from 16,888 of our own passes. Routing, delivery promises and vehicle choice all read from it.
One order, one network, ten trades
Groceries, a kitchen meal, a craft order, a vegetable subscription and a ride to the block hospital are the same dispatch problem with different vendors attached. Building them as one system is why the service list doubled this year without the company doing so — a doctor, a wedding and a paid exchange between neighbours each cost a router and a model, not a new deployment.
Where we actually are
One block, live. A district, mapped.
It would be easy to write this page as though the network already covers Bihar. It does not, and a page that pretended otherwise would be the wrong first impression to give anyone who might back it.
- Delivering today
- Harnaut block, Nalanda district
- Households
- Beta — onboarding by hand, village by village
- District enumerated
- 20 blocks · 229 panchayats · 284 nodes placed
- Road network held
- 3,146 segments · 900 km
- Measured by our own fleet
- 2,022 segments · 598 km
- Services built and running
- All 10, plus wholesale, showrooms and surveys
- Android build serving today
- v2.8.8 · ≈68 MB · sideloaded
What we are not claiming
Metagaon is early. All 10services are built, verified end to end and running on real infrastructure — but the traffic on them is a pilot’s worth, in one block, onboarded by people who drove there. Several of them have no supply yet at all: a module with no doctors in it says zero rather than hiding, because “built and waiting” and “not built” are different facts and we are not going to blur them. The numbers worth trusting on this page are the ones about the district and the fleet, because those were earned before the marketplace existed.
Measured, not surveyed
Every village has a page, and it keeps its own score
A household opens Metagaon and sees their own village rather than a shop: which services reach it, whether a driver covers it, whether anyone here earns from the network yet. The same page is what a block development officer sees.
The milestones are scored against things the system already counts — not a survey that goes stale between rounds and not a household answering questions about itself. They are tagged to the Localised SDG themes a BDO already works in, and the page is explicit about which themes we can say nothing about.
A village page, as it reads
- ✓A driver serves this villageSelf-sufficient infrastructure
- ✓Shops deliver hereSelf-sufficient infrastructure
- ✓Households are using it
- A driver from this villagePoverty-free & enhanced livelihoods
- Services running here
We cannot see whether a house has piped water or an LPG connection, so no milestone here claims to. What the network can see is whether a village is connected to a market, whether somebody in it earns from that, and whether the delivery arrived on an electric vehicle.
Get it, or ask for it
If your district isn't covered, say so — it is how we choose the next one.
Install the app anywhere in India and register your village. Interest is recorded by block, and the block with the most households asking is the block that opens next. That is not a waiting list gesture; it is the actual input to the decision.