Mangaluru City Corporation is preparing a data-driven overhaul of waste management by mapping nearly 900 sanitation workers, drivers and loaders, along with collection vehicles, to identify service gaps and assign clearer responsibility across the city.
MCC commissioner Rahul Ratnam Pandey said the corporation currently does not have a precise day-to-day record of where every sanitation worker is deployed or which areas are being covered by individual vehicles. The proposed system will map personnel, workloads, streets, collection routes and vehicle capacity on a ward-wise basis.
“We have almost 900 people working with the MCC. As commissioner, I do not know on a daily basis who goes where,” Pandey said, according to a report by the Times of India. “We are now planning to precisely map who has to do what work, where they need to go and what they need to clean.”
The mapping is intended to allow the corporation to identify the official or team assigned to a particular street and the driver responsible for a specific collection route. Pandey said the MCC could gain greater clarity on these deployments within 20 to 25 days. The exercise is expected to help the civic body fix responsibility for sanitation work and respond more directly when services are missed.
The corporation also plans to assess how much waste each vehicle can collect and how many households or locations it can cover. This would allow officials to identify areas where the existing fleet is inadequate, measure demand and prioritise resources instead of attempting to purchase replacement vehicles for every location at once.
“There are limits to how many places a vehicle can cover and what number of houses it can collect waste from,” Pandey said. “We cannot procure all new vehicles at once, but at least we will know where the shortfall exists, where the demand is high and where the pressure lies. Based on that, we can prioritise those areas.”
The proposal places operational information at the centre of the city’s waste management response. At present, daily deployment is managed through reporting arrangements involving sanitation personnel and health inspectors. The planned ward-wise mapping would add a more detailed record of assignments and routes to that system.
Pandey has also asked the state government to bring back Madhu S Manohar, an assistant executive engineer currently posted in Kolar, to Mangaluru. The request is intended to support efforts to streamline the corporation’s waste management operations.
Separately, the MCC is working on a framework to designate “Nuisance Detectors” who would be authorised to impose spot fines on people violating solid waste management rules. The proposed personnel could include designated health inspectors or other civic officials.
The authority for such personnel is provided under solid waste management rules, but the MCC has not implemented the system in Mangaluru so far. The proposed mechanism is aimed at cases such as dumping waste outside shops or in other public places.
Pandey said violations are sometimes captured on camera and reported to the corporation, but the process of issuing notices and conducting hearings can delay action. The framework for nuisance detectors is intended to allow faster enforcement through spot fines. The corporation’s next steps are to complete the personnel and vehicle mapping and work on the framework for designating officials with enforcement powers.
