GullyGuide: A Location-Aware, Role-Based City Information Platform Built on the MERN Stack | IJCT Volume 13 – Issue 3 | IJCT-V13I3P30
International Journal of Computer Techniques
ISSN 2394-2231
Author
Kunal, Himanshu Dadsena, Nishant Sahu, Sameer Jaiswal, Swati Verma, Khemchand Sahu, Akash Baidya
Abstract
Urban residents, students, tourists, and job seekers increasingly struggle to obtain accurate, timely, and city-specific information from the web. Existing platforms either operate in silos—covering only news, or only jobs, or only tourism—or they lack geo-spatial awareness altogether, forcing users to consult half a dozen disconnected portals for information about a single city. This paper presents GullyGuide, a location-aware, role-based web platform engineered on the MERN stack (MongoDB, Express.js, React.js, Node.js) that consolidates local news, employment listings, public and private events, tourism destinations, and neighbourhood business directories into one unified experience. The system automatically tailors its content feed to a user’s current city and enforces a three-tier access model—Administrator, Contributor, and Normal User—to ensure that only verified information reaches the public. Two distinguishing features—a map-integrated vendor discovery module and a QR-code-anchored upvote and review mechanism—introduce physical-world accountability into digital feedback for the first time in this class of civic platforms. Performance evaluation under simulated concurrent load demonstrates sub-300 ms median API response times, zero critical failures during stress testing, and a modular architecture that readily accommodates future microservice decomposition. Comparative analysis against incumbent platforms confirms that GullyGuide reduces the number of sources a user must consult from five or more to one, while maintaining strong data integrity through admin-mediated content workflows.
Keywords
city information system; MERN stack; location-based services; role-based access control; QR-code review; smart city; web platform; content management
Conclusion
This paper has presented GullyGuide, a location-aware, role-governed civic web platform that consolidates news, events, jobs, business discovery, and tourism information for Tier-2 Indian cities into a single, coherent user experience. The platform is engineered on the MERN stack and introduces two novel mechanisms—automatic geolocation-based city scoping and QR-anchored physical review validation—that collectively address the twin problems of content fragmentation and review authenticity that afflict existing civic information platforms.
Experimental evaluation under load demonstrates that the system performs well within acceptable latency thresholds for up to 100 concurrent users, with zero error rates and Lighthouse scores above 90 across performance and accessibility dimensions. Comparative analysis confirms that no commercially available platform satisfies the complete feature set addressed by GullyGuide, particularly for Tier-2 city contexts.
The modular architecture provides a clear migration path toward microservices as the platform scales, and the open REST API is ready for mobile client integration. With continued community engagement, government partnership, and the planned AI-powered enhancements, GullyGuide has the potential to evolve into a comprehensive digital companion for cities that have long been underserved by national-scale platforms.^
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How to Cite This Paper
Kunal, Himanshu Dadsena, Nishant Sahu, Sameer Jaiswal, Swati Verma, Khemchand Sahu, Akash Baidya (2026). GullyGuide: A Location-Aware, Role-Based City Information Platform Built on the MERN Stack. International Journal of Computer Techniques, 13(2). ISSN: 2394-2231.
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