Garbage dumped by the roadside on Magadi Road in Bengaluru.
| Photo Credit: SUDHAKARA JAIN

The new garbage tenders for Bengaluru led to the first face-off between the new Chief Minister D.K. Shivakumar and Leader of Opposition in Karnataka Legislative Assembly R. Ashok on Wednesday. While Mr. Ashok lodged a complaint with Governor Thaawarchand Gehlot and Karnataka Lokayukta alleging a “₹39,000 Crore scam with a ₹10,000 Crore kickback” in the new Integrated Solid Waste Management (ISWM) tenders and demanded a probe, Mr. Shivakumar hit back, saying Mr. Ashok had become a “spokesperson for the garbage mafia”. 

Mr. Ashok alleged that the tender was brought to the Cabinet and approved just before Siddaramaiah resigned as Chief Minister. He claimed that “the tender was approved allegedly under pressure from the ‘high command’ even as around 10 Ministers protested”. 

However, Mr. Shivakumar asked why garbage tenders could not be called during the BJP’s time. “Their [BJP’s] own MLAs have told us that garbage tenders were not allowed to be called for the past 10-12 years. They moved court for everything. Finally, the court ruled that the government’s decision was correct,” he said, adding MLAs were indulging in blackmail politics over garbage. “Arvind Limbavali had stopped garbage transportation altogether. We gave a grant of ₹800 crore due to pressures from MLAs,” he said. 

‘Vendor to invest ₹6000 crore’

Contracts for end-to-end SWM collection, processing and disposal for the entire city have been split into two packages — North and South — and the same firm, Delhi MSW Solutions Limited, said to be a subsidiary of the Ramky Group, has reportedly bagged them for 30 years, extendable by another five years, totalling about ₹39,000 crore. The company will invest nearly ₹6,000 crore and build waste processing parks on land provided by the State government, Mr. Shivakumar said. “Gas and electricity must be produced from waste. Previously, we had given permission to 14–15 firms to produce energy from waste. Not a single one succeeded. Before taking this decision, I visited Delhi, Hyderabad and Chennai to study the matter,” he said.

Mr. Ashok alleged that the tipping fee per tonne of waste, currently ₹260, would rise to ₹2,400, an increase of 950%. However, officials said this was misleading. They said the present tipping fee is only for the collection and transportation of waste, and under the new contract, the company will also be responsible for processing the waste in the parks it will invest in and build, an official said.

FD objections

However, Mr. Ashok further pointed out that the Finance Department had raised several objections, including both packages being awarded to the same firm, a 30-year contract tenure, and a 5% annual escalation in the tipping fee, which appear to have been overruled.

The Finance Department had advised reducing the period to 10 years and the escalation to 2.5%, warning that otherwise it would become a huge burden in the future, he said. He added that consultant RITES Ltd. for the DPR had initially estimated the tipping fee at ₹1,398 per tonne, but it was later revised to ₹2,151 per tonne based on recommendations attributed to consultants, an increase of over 53%.

Ready to face probe 

While BJP has demanded an independent and time-bound inquiry into the entire ISWM tenders, Chief Minister Mr. Shivakumar said he was ready to face any probe into the tenders. “Let them submit a report anywhere. Let alone ₹36,000 crore — even if ₹10 crore is misused, let them investigate. I am ready to face it,” he said. 

Published – June 10, 2026 08:20 pm IST

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. 

Read more | ₹3 lakh collected in fines every day as late-night waste dumping under scanner in Bengaluru

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. 

Read more |Two solid waste management plants to be set up in Bengaluru

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