The engagement
COMPLIT designed and built Sugam Darshan, the darshan pass management system used by the office of the District Commissioner, Kamrup Metropolitan, Government of Assam. The system is deployed on the district administration’s own domain and handles the complete lifecycle of referral and protocol darshan passes for Kamakhya Temple — from the moment a request arrives to the moment a pass is scanned at the gate.
It is an internal government system. Access is restricted to authorised officials, so there is no public-facing booking interface. This is distinct from the temple’s public special darshan booking portal, which is operated separately by the Kamakhya Devalaya Management Committee.
What the system does
Two intake paths
Requests reach the District Commissioner’s office in two ways, and the system handles both.
Staff can enter a visitor group directly through a web form. Alternatively, requests that arrive by email are ingested automatically: inbound mail is received through Amazon SES, stored in S3, parsed, and converted into a structured visitor record without manual re-keying. A scheduled job checks for new mail every minute.
A third path sits between the two — an assisted entry screen where staff paste free-form text from a letter or message and the system extracts the structured fields for one-click group creation.
Approval workflow
Every group is approved or rejected by a logged-in official. Rejections carry a reason, and both outcomes trigger automatic notification to the applicant by SMS and email. Role-based permissions separate superadministrator, administrator, and user capabilities.
Capacity management
Daily quotas are enforced per date, with a configurable overbooking buffer to account for no-shows — the same operational reality airlines and hospitals plan around. Capacity is computed at the point of approval rather than tracked manually.
Pass generation and gate verification
Approved groups receive a PDF pass carrying an embedded QR code. The QR encodes a cryptographically signed URL, so a pass cannot be forged by editing a printed document or guessing an identifier. When scanned at the gate, the system confirms whether the pass is valid and whether the visit date has already passed.
Passes can be issued as password-protected PDFs by email, or bulk-printed for every approval on a given date — which matters on high-volume days when the office is preparing passes in advance.
Reporting
An administrative dashboard reports six-month trends across requests received, approved, and rejected, alongside breakdowns of referring states and designations — giving the office a view of demand patterns rather than a filing cabinet of individual decisions.
How AI is actually used
We want to be precise about this, because “AI-powered government system” is a phrase that gets used loosely.
The system uses Google Gemini for exactly one job: turning unstructured text into structured data. When a request arrives as a free-form email or a pasted letter, the model extracts the contact person, visitor names, referring official, designation, state, and visit date into a structured record.
The AI makes no decisions. It does not approve passes, reject requests, verify identity, or gate entry. Every approval is a deliberate action taken by an authorised official who is accountable for it. In a government context that distinction is not a technicality — it is the difference between a tool that removes clerical work and a system that removes human accountability. We built the former deliberately.
Where the model cannot extract a required field, the system replies to the applicant asking for the missing information rather than creating an incomplete record.
Technology
- Backend: Laravel 12 on PHP 8.2, MySQL
- Authentication and roles: Laravel Breeze with Laratrust role and permission management
- Frontend: server-rendered Blade templates with Alpine.js and Tailwind CSS
- Documents: DomPDF for pass generation, Simple QrCode for signed verification codes
- Email infrastructure: Amazon SES for outbound and inbound mail, S3 for message storage, MIME parsing for inbound extraction
- Notifications: custom SMS integration via Fast2SMS
- AI: Google Gemini for structured field extraction
Server-rendered Blade was a deliberate choice over a single-page framework. Government offices run on a wide range of hardware and network conditions, and a server-rendered application is faster on low-end machines, degrades more gracefully on poor connections, and is simpler for a future team to maintain.
Why this kind of work is different
Government systems carry constraints that commercial projects often do not. Records must be auditable. Authority must sit with an accountable human being. Systems must work reliably for staff who did not choose the software and cannot opt out of it. Integration happens with established channels — in this case, official email — rather than replacing them wholesale.
Sugam Darshan was built around those constraints rather than in spite of them. The email ingestion path exists precisely because officials will continue to send requests by email, and a system that demanded they stop would simply be worked around.
Working with COMPLIT on government technology
COMPLIT is a Guwahati-based software company working across government digital transformation, citizen service platforms, and custom software for organisations in Assam and the Northeast. We are a Startup India registered company and an incubatee of Assam Startup under Cohort 6.
If your department or organisation is running a process on email, spreadsheets, and paper that should be a system, get in touch. You can also see our open source projects.
