Unfold the Untold (NPCI)

NPCI (National Payments Corporation of India) client logo

An Independence Day campaign for NPCI (National Payments Corporation of India). Scan any tri-colour object with your phone — once, twice, three times — and unlock untold stories of remarkable people from remote parts of India. Single-day deployment, ~5 lakh users served in 10 hours.

Status
Shipped
Client
NPCI (National Payments Corporation of India)
Context
Independence Day ad campaign — newspapers, Twitter, web. One-day deployment.
Role
Backend, AI, infra, deployment, DevOps. Built end-to-end alongside a frontend partner.

Bill of materials

  • Python
  • LLM pipelines
  • Image detection
  • Auto-scaling infra

NPCI’s “Unfold the Untold” was an Independence Day campaign that ran in newspapers, on Twitter, and across the web. The premise: open the link on your phone, point your camera at any tri-colour object — a flag, a wall, a saree, anything in saffron-white-green — and unlock a video. Scan once for the first story, twice for the second, three times for the third. The videos were untold stories of people in remote parts of India doing remarkable things.

What I built

The frontend came from a partner. I owned everything else: the AI pipeline that decided whether a frame contained a tri-colour object, the LLM orchestration around the scan flow, the infrastructure that scaled to handle a national campaign, and the day-of DevOps.

The detection layer needed to be permissive enough that any tri-colour object qualified, strict enough that random photos didn’t trigger, and fast enough to feel instant on a phone camera.

Scale

Roughly 5 lakh users (~500,000) in a 10-hour window on launch day, all served from a one-day deployment. No graceful degradation, no warm-up — the campaign hit the front page of major outlets and traffic arrived all at once.