Mangaluru City Corporation is planning a data-driven overhaul of waste management by mapping nearly 900 sanitation personnel, collection vehicles and workloads ward by ward, a move intended 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 its pourakarmikas, drivers and loaders are deployed. The proposed system will record who is assigned to each street or area, what work they are expected to perform and which routes are allotted to individual waste collection vehicles.
“We have almost 900 people working with the MCC. As commissioner, I do not know on a daily basis who goes where. They report daily, and health inspectors manage them. We are now planning to precisely map who has to do what work, where they need to go and what they need to clean,” Pandey said.
The commissioner said the corporation expects to gain greater clarity within the next 20 to 25 days. Once the mapping is completed, the MCC plans to fix specific responsibilities for its sanitation personnel and make it possible to identify the official assigned to a particular street or cleaning task.
The corporation will also map its waste collection fleet and assess the amount of service delivered by each vehicle. The exercise is intended to show which areas have too few vehicles, where demand is higher and where collection pressure is greatest. Pandey said the MCC would use this information to prioritise resources rather than attempt to procure all new vehicles at once.
“There are limits to how many places a vehicle can cover and how many houses it can collect waste from. 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,” he said.
Pandey has also asked the state government to bring back Madhu S Manohar, an assistant executive engineer currently posted in Kolar, to Mangaluru to help streamline the city’s waste management system. The request is part of the corporation’s efforts to strengthen administrative support for the proposed overhaul.
Alongside the mapping exercise, the MCC is working on a framework to appoint ‘Nuisance Detectors’ to curb the dumping of garbage in public places. The designated personnel would be empowered to impose spot fines on people violating solid waste management rules, similar to the enforcement powers used by traffic police.
The commissioner said the rules already provide for the designation of such personnel, but Mangaluru City Corporation has not implemented the system so far. Specific health inspectors or other officials could be appointed to levy spot fines, including in cases where waste is dumped outside shops or in other public areas.
At present, even when dumping violations are captured on camera and reported to the corporation, issuing notices and conducting hearings can delay enforcement. The proposed nuisance-detector framework is intended to allow quicker action once an official is authorised to impose a fine. The MCC’s next stated milestone is to complete the personnel and vehicle mapping within 20 to 25 days.
