The digital sweep: transforming sanitation through smart governance for contemporary urban resilience and sustainability

Municipal sanitation in India has moved from a manual, complaint driven activity to a system that runs on data. This paper studies that shift in Tirupati Municipal Corporation, a Tier II temple city in Andhra Pradesh that has been ranked among the cleanest large cities in India for several years in a row. The paper looks at four digital tools used by the corporation: an Online Waste Management System with radio frequency identification tags for door-to-door collection, GPS fitted vehicles for secondary transport, an Integrated Command and Control Centre that pulls together camera feeds and sensor data, and the Spandana grievance platform that lets residents track complaints. Methodologically, it is a qualitative, descriptive single-city case study that draws entirely on secondary and documentary sources, so it characterises the system and proposes testable links rather than establishing causal effects. Using government records, Swachh Survekshan results, Central Pollution Control Board reports, and peer reviewed literature on smart waste management and digital governance, the paper builds a picture of how these tools connect to three outcomes: how efficiently waste is collected and processed, how satisfied and included citizens feel, and how much waste is diverted from landfill through segregation and recovery. The evidence shows that Tirupati collects waste from all reported households, segregates it through three chambered auto tippers, processes a large share of it locally through six decentralised units, a bio methanation plant, and a plastic recovery facility, and has reclaimed close to twenty six acres of land at the old Ramapuram dumpsite. The paper argues that digital tools add value here mainly because they make an invisible service visible and auditable, not because the technology alone changes behaviour, and that this auditability is itself a form of resilience, since a system that can prove what it has done can also be held to account when it falls short. It also flags a real risk that digital grievance channels can leave out residents with poor internet access or low digital skill, a concern raised widely in the digital divide literature. The paper closes with a call for primary survey data and cost tracking so that future studies can test these relationships with numbers rather than description alone.