About BantayBaha
What is this?
BantayBaha tracks DPWH flood control and drainage projects in Metro Manila. It pulls data from the official DPWH Transparency Portal and scans each project for red flags and warning signs using publicly available information. The goal: make it easier for citizens, journalists, and researchers to spot projects that deserve closer scrutiny.
How we flag projects
Every project is checked against a set of rules. Some trigger red flags (serious concerns), others trigger warnings (worth noting but not necessarily alarming). A project with zero flags can still have problems we can't detect yet.
Only one company submitted a bid. No competitive bidding took place, which means no pressure to offer fair pricing.
The project is more than a year past its contract expiry date.
The contractor holds 20 or more flood control projects in NCR. High concentration in a single contractor is a pattern tracked by anti-corruption researchers.
The project was officially terminated before completion.
Based on available data, there is a gap between reported spending and reported physical progress. This check is limited because DPWH does not publish per-project disbursement figures.
The Commission on Audit included this project in its audit observations. (Data source not yet integrated.)
Only two companies bid on this project. Limited competition can lead to inflated costs.
The project has exceeded its original contract expiry date by 6 or more months.
The contractor has 15-19 projects in the region. Notable but below the red flag threshold.
The project or contractor appeared in news coverage related to DPWH flood control concerns. (Data source not yet integrated.)
The project description is too generic to verify what's actually being built.
This project is funded through a legislator-initiated allocation rather than the regular national infrastructure budget.
What we can't check (and why it matters)
The most powerful check for infrastructure corruption is simple: compare how much money was released against how much work was actually done. If ₱50 million was disbursed but only 10% of the road exists, something is wrong.
DPWH does not publish this data. Every single project on the transparency portal shows ₱0 disbursed, including completed projects worth hundreds of millions of pesos. The data field exists in their system but is never populated.
This is unusual by international standards. In the US, USAspending.gov tracks federal spending from appropriation to recipient. The CoST Infrastructure Transparency Initiative, adopted by countries across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, requires disbursement records as part of its 40-point data standard. The Philippines is a member of the Open Government Partnership and is building the Project DIME platform with DBM that will eventually include disbursement tracking, but that data isn't public yet.
In February 2026, DPWH launched the Integrity Chain Portal, a blockchain-based ledger that promises to track payments. But it currently only covers foreign-assisted projects, not regular infrastructure like the flood control projects tracked here.
Until disbursement data is published, BantayBaha works with what's available: contractor patterns, timeline anomalies, project status, and data completeness. These catch real problems, but they can't catch the biggest one.
Data confidence
Not every project has complete data. Each project gets a confidence level based on how many fields have actual values: high (90%+ fields populated), medium (60-89%), or low (below 60%). Projects with low confidence may have flags we can't detect, or may appear cleaner than they are simply because the data is incomplete.
Where the data comes from
All project data comes from the DPWH Transparency Portal (transparency.dpwh.gov.ph), which launched in November 2024 under President Marcos's anti-corruption push. Our dataset was fetched in May 2026 and filtered for NCR flood control and drainage projects. We cross-reference with the BetterGov open data initiative on Hugging Face, which aggregates DPWH data under a CC0 public domain license.
Legal disclaimer
Red flags and warnings are algorithmic assessments based on publicly available data from the DPWH Transparency Portal. They do not constitute evidence of wrongdoing, fraud, corruption, or legal liability. A flagged project may have a perfectly valid explanation. An unflagged project may still have serious issues we can't detect with current data. BantayBaha is an independent civic project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the Department of Public Works and Highways, the Commission on Audit, or any government agency.