A walk on a road in any Indian city is incomplete without one stepping in or passing by a mound of garbage. Entitled citizens treating city roads as an open trash bin are unfortunately more common than one would like but one person in Bengaluru hopes to change this. 

Read more |Garbage hotspots on rise amid new solid waste management rules

Last month, Jyothish VM launched NammaKasa, a digital platform created using AI that encourages citizens to report garbage blackspots in their localities. “I had been complaining about Bengaluru’s garbage problem like everyone else, talking about it, doing nothing. That frustration had been building for years, and I decided to stop complaining and build something instead,” says the product designer who currently works at a fintech company in the city. 

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Jyothish started building the platform on April 4 and launched publicly on April 8, 2026. “I am a designer, not an engineer, so every line of code was written with AI assistance. I used AI tools extensively and the platform is built on React, Supabase, and MapLibre. The most technically complex part was mapping 369 Greater Bengaluru Authority ward boundaries to GPS coordinates so that every report automatically identifies the correct ward and the authorities responsible for it,” he explains. 

So how does the site work? A citizen is required to take a live photo at the spot, and submit it on the NammaKasa website. The report goes through a three-layer moderation pipeline: Google Vision SafeSearch flags inappropriate images, Claude AI verifies it is a genuine civic issue, and Jyothish manually reviews edge cases. Once approved, the report appears live on the public map linked to the ward and responsible authorities.

“Resolution is something I am actively working to formalise. What has happened organically is that civic volunteers and BSWML Marshals in parts of Bengaluru, particularly Mahadevapura, discovered the platform after it went viral on social media and started using it to locate and close garbage black spots,” says Jyothish, adding how officials visit the spot, clean it up, and upload a verification photo marking it resolved. “The report turns green on the map. This has happened without any formal agreement, the data quality and public visibility of the platform brought them in naturally. Scaling this to all 338 wards through formal government integration is the next step,” adds the 31-year-old.

Once the platform went live and gained traction online, BSWML Marshals and the government’s frontline waste management officers started using NammaKasa to locate and close garbage black spots without any outreach from Jyothish. “The support came entirely organically and I was amazed since the platform was only a few days old. The Mahadevapura Task Force reached out and began actively coordinating resolutions through the platform,” says Jyothish. Soon, Clement C Jayakumar, a civic activist and former BBMP nominated councillor, and Arun Pai, founder of Bangalore Walks, came on board as consultants. 

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While NammaKasa has gained the support of officials, by design it is a community-led initiative that needs to be replicated by citizens across the city and country. “The platform is designed for community ownership. The data is CC-BY licensed, free for anyone to use and build on. Journalists, researchers, civic organisations, and RWAs can download the full dataset. The analytics page is public so anyone can monitor ward-level performance. The next step is deeper integration with government bodies so that resolution becomes systematic rather than dependent on individual initiative,” says Jyothish.

NammaKasa is the first layer of what could become a comprehensive civic infrastructure accountability platform and there is scope for similar AI-powered platforms for other civic issues. “Garbage was the starting point because it is the most visible and universally felt civic failure. The same model, citizen reporting, GPS attribution, public accountability, AI moderation can work for potholes, broken streetlights, open manholes, and encroachments,” he says, adding that he is now working towards deploying this model for municipalities across India as a managed service. “The vision is a live civic accountability layer for every city, where every pothole, every garbage pile, every broken streetlight has a named authority attached to it and a public record of whether it was fixed.”

Details on nammakasa.in

Published – May 27, 2026 01:47 pm IST