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

1 Introduction

Cities in India generate waste faster than they can plan for it. National estimates put urban India's daily solid waste output at well over 150,000 t in the early 2020s, a figure that has been rising steadily as more people move to cities and consumption patterns change, and that some reviews project could reach well over 100 million tonnes a year by the end of the decade (Kumar and Agrawal, 2020; Soni et al., 2023). Municipal corporations, which are the bodies legally responsible for collecting and treating this waste, have had to find new ways to keep pace, and one of the clearest trends of the past decade has been a turn towards digital tools such as sensors, radio tags, GPS units, and mobile applications to run collection and processing more tightly.

This shift sits inside a larger national push. The Swachh Bharat Mission Urban, started in 2014, set targets for full door to door collection, waste segregation at the household level, and the end of open dumping, and its second phase, launched in 2021, aims to make every city in the country free of garbage by 2026. The annual Swachh Survekshan survey, now in its ninth or tenth round depending on how it is counted, turns this policy into a competition, ranking cities on infrastructure checks carried out by field assessors and on citizen feedback gathered through calls, an app, and online forms. A city's score depends partly on whether its systems can prove, with records rather than promises, that collection actually happened. This is where digital tools earn their place, because a paper register can be edited or lost, while a scan log from a radio tag is easier to audit and less readily altered after the fact.

Tirupati offers a useful case for studying this change. It is the largest urban local body in the former Chittoor district of Andhra Pradesh and a temple town that receives a very large number of pilgrims each year, which puts constant pressure on its sanitation system. In the Swachh Survekshan 2023 cycle the city placed eighth among all Indian cities with a population above one lakh, and it holds a five star Garbage Free City rating and a Water Plus rating. This performance has come alongside a visible build up of digital infrastructure: an RFID based collection tracking system, GPS fitted secondary transport vehicles, an Integrated Command and Control Centre under the Smart Cities Mission, and an online grievance platform called Spandana.

Much of the published research on smart waste management looks either at large metropolitan cities or at the technical design of individual sensors and algorithms, tested mostly in simulation or in small pilot areas (Sosunova and Porras, 2022; Addas et al., 2024). Fewer studies look closely at a single mid sized city and connect its specific digital tools to the sanitation outcomes that city has actually recorded over time. This gap matters because most Indian cities are not megacities like Mumbai or Delhi. They are places like Tirupati, with populations in the hundreds of thousands, tight municipal budgets, and specific local pressures such as religious tourism. A study rooted in this kind of city can offer lessons that generalise better to the roughly four thousand other urban local bodies in India that share this profile.

A city level account of a working digital sanitation system, built from checkable public data rather than laboratory simulation, gives readers a real system to weigh against their own city rather than an abstract model, and it speaks directly to three themes that now sit at the centre of urban policy debate in India: environmental sustainability, smart governance, and urban resilience. Sustainability enters through the question of how much waste is diverted from landfill and returned to productive use; smart governance enters through the question of whether digital tools make a public service more transparent and accountable; and urban resilience enters through the question of whether a mid sized city's systems can absorb a variable, pilgrim driven service load without breaking down. Read together, these three lenses frame everything that follows in this paper.

This paper has three aims. First, it sets out to map, in plain terms, the digital tools that Tirupati Municipal Corporation actually uses in its sanitation department. Second, it lays out the service and environmental outcomes that are documented for these tools using verifiable government and press sources, without inventing numbers that are not on record. Third, it builds a simple framework connecting digital tools to three outcomes, namely operational efficiency, citizen facing service quality, and environmental sustainability, that later researchers can test with primary data such as household surveys or sensor logs. The paper is organised as follows. Section 2 sets out the background of the study, situating Tirupati within the wider literature on digital governance, smart waste management, and sustainable urban resource use. Section 3 sets out the city and policy context in more specific, place based detail. Section 4 explains the sources, method, and a conceptual framework linking digital tools to outcomes. Section 5 presents results organised by the four digital layers and their outcomes, including a comparative view of Tirupati against other Indian cities. Section 6 discusses what these results mean, Section 7 gives conclusion of the study. Section 8 lists limitations and Ssection 9 provides recommendations for practitioners. Section 10 presents directions for future work.

2 Background of the study

Before turning to the general literature, it is worth being specific about what kind of place Tirupati is, since this shapes which strands of research are actually relevant to it. Tirupati is not a metropolitan capital and not a small town either; it is a mid-sized city (commonly grouped as Tier II) whose Municipal Corporation population is about 3.74 lakh (Census 2011) that also absorbs one of the largest pilgrim flows of any city in India, drawn by the Tirumala temple. This combination, a modest municipal budget paired with a service load that periodically spikes to levels more typical of a much larger city, is the specific condition that the background below is read against. A finding from research on Mumbai's waste logistics or on a simulated sensor network does not automatically transfer to a city with Tirupati's budget and footfall pattern, so the sections that follow single out, evidence from other Tier II and religious tourism cities in India focusing on digital governance and smart waste management.

2.1 Digitalisation and public service delivery

Research on electronic government has for a long time treated the addition of computers and networks to public administration as more than a simple upgrade. Coursey and Norris (2008) questioned early staged models of e government, which assumed that governments move step by step from putting information online to offering full digital transactions, and argued that real world adoption is messier and shaped by local politics and capacity as much as by the technology on offer. More recent work by Tangi et al. (2021) builds on this by treating digital transformation as an outcome of both technical readiness and organisational will, showing through a structural model that staff attitudes and leadership support matter as much as software choice in whether a digital reform actually changes how a service is delivered. Gaie and Mehta (2024) frame this same shift as a move from digitising individual forms and records towards combining data and algorithms across a whole public service, a trajectory that is easier to describe than to achieve, and Eom and Lee (2022) show, drawing on the disruption of the COVID-19 period, that government digital capacity built up gradually over normal years is what allows a service to keep functioning when it is suddenly put under strain, a point with an obvious echo in how a sanitation department needs to keep collecting waste through the peak of a festival season. MacLean and Titah (2022), reviewing the empirical literature on e-government impacts through a public value lens, caution that many claimed benefits of digitalisation are asserted rather than demonstrated, which is one reason this paper is explicit throughout about the difference between a documented tool and a demonstrated effect. Malodia et al. (2021) propose an integrated framework in which technology, organisation, and environment jointly determine whether an e-government initiative succeeds, a framing this paper borrows loosely in building its own conceptual model in Section 4. More recent scholarship has pushed this literature towards artificial intelligence and automation: Margetts and Dunleavy (2024) describe how large technology firms have reshaped the underlying data infrastructure of digital government, while Marienfeldt et al. (2024) compare top down and bottom up routes to digital transformation across different institutional settings and find that neither route reliably outperforms the other on its own. A systematic review by Figueredo and Silva (2026), drawing on Scopus and Web of Science records, finds that the barriers to digital public services shift with a country's level of development, with basic infrastructure gaps dominating in lower income settings and more advanced concerns, such as algorithmic governance, dominating in wealthier ones, a pattern consistent with the infrastructure and workforce constraints described later in this paper for a Tier II Indian city. Latupeirissa et al. (2024), reviewing digitisation initiatives in public service delivery more broadly, reach a similar conclusion, namely that the technology itself is rarely the limiting factor once a basic digital layer is in place.

A theme that keeps returning across this literature is that digital service quality feeds into citizen satisfaction and, eventually, trust in the institution providing the service. Dhungana et al. (2024) studied this chain in Nepal and found that information quality, system quality, and service quality of an e governance platform all shape how satisfied a citizen feels, but crucially, they also found that the digital divide moderates this relationship. In simple terms, a digital service can only build satisfaction among the people who can actually use it, and where connectivity or digital skill is patchy, the benefits of digitalisation do not reach everyone equally. This point matters for any city, including Tirupati, that leans on an app or web portal for grievance redressal, because a system built only around one channel risks leaving out residents who are older, poorer, or less familiar with smartphones. AbdulKareem and Oladimeji (2024) make a related point in arguing that trust and digital literacy jointly determine whether a citizen actually adopts an e-government channel once it exists, so building the channel is only half the task. Djatmiko et al. (2025), studying e-government adoption among marginalised communities, similarly find that public-private partnerships and targeted digital literacy programmes matter more for genuine inclusion than simply expanding infrastructure, while Mesa (2023) shows in an Italian setting that educational inequality specifically, not just income or age, predicts whether a citizen trusts and uses a digitised public service. Fırtın et al. (2025) extend this line of argument by showing that the positive effect of citizen e-participation on government accountability itself weakens where the digital divide is wide, which suggests that digital channels can widen as well as narrow the gap between a government and the people it serves depending on how evenly access is spread. Yang et al. (2024), studying smart city construction in China, report a similar tension at city scale, finding that heavy investment in smart infrastructure can aggravate rather than relieve urban inequality if it is not paired with deliberate inclusion measures.

Reji et al. (2025) traced India's own path in e governance, from early computerisation of file work to cloud based citizen services, and noted that despite real gains in scale, the country still struggles with patchy rural infrastructure, uneven digital literacy, and concerns about data privacy. These same tensions appear at the city level and are directly relevant to sanitation, where a resident who cannot use an app to report an uncollected bin is, in effect, excluded from part of the feedback loop that keeps the system honest. For services like sanitation, where a missed collection is felt immediately by the resident, Cordella and Tempini (2015) point out that digital tools solve a specific and old problem, which is that municipal services have historically been hard to verify from outside the department that runs them. A record that shows exactly when and where a truck visited turns a promise into a fact that can be checked. Fakhoury and Aubert (2015), studying citizen use of public e-services in Lebanon, add that this kind of verifiable record only builds citizen trust where the citizen also trusts the institution behind it in the first place, since a checkable system run by a distrusted authority does not automatically become more trusted simply because it is now digital.

Underlying much of this literature is an older idea from technology acceptance research, namely that a tool only produces value once people actually use it, and that use itself depends on whether people find the tool useful and easy to work with, a relationship first modelled formally by Davis (1989) in his Technology Acceptance Model. Applied to a municipal setting, this means that an RFID reader or a grievance app only helps a city if the sanitation worker scanning a tag and the resident filing a complaint both find the tool workable in their daily routine, not simply because the tool exists on paper. Closely related is the idea of a digital divide that goes beyond simple access to a device or a connection. van Dijk and Hacker (2003) argued that even once basic access is available, gaps in the skill needed to use a tool effectively, and in the motivation to keep using it, can leave a digital divide firmly in place. Both ideas matter for reading the Tirupati case, because a system that looks complete on an official dashboard can still be experienced unevenly by different residents and workers depending on their comfort with the underlying tools.

2.2 Smart waste management and its sustainability rationale

A separate but closely linked body of research looks at the technical side of smart waste systems. Sosunova and Porras (2022), in a systematic review covering studies published between 2014 and 2022, describe a fairly consistent stack of tools across projects worldwide: sensors that report how full a bin is, radio frequency tags that confirm a bin or property has been serviced, GPS units that track and help plan truck routes, and software that turns this stream of data into dashboards for managers. Their review of 173 studies found that most systems aim at one or more of three goals, namely cutting the cost of collection, improving the accuracy of route planning, and giving citizens more visibility into the process. Kannan et al. (2024), in a later systematic review framed around Industry 4.0, organise this same toolkit into a single SWM4.0 framework spanning smart people, smart cities, smart enterprises, and smart factories, and argue that the next useful step for the field is linking these previously separate solutions together rather than inventing further standalone sensors. Working specifically in an Indian setting, Agrawal et al. (2025) identify workforce resistance, patchy connectivity, and unclear ownership between departments as the main barriers that keep an IoT-enabled system from delivering its full promised benefit, which matches concerns raised throughout this paper about pairing digital tools with adequate non digital investment. Saha and Chaki (2023), writing during the COVID-19 period, add that the pandemic pushed several cities to accelerate touchless, sensor based monitoring specifically to reduce worker exposure, showing that the case for these tools is not purely about efficiency but sometimes about worker safety as well. On the citizen side, Cudjoe et al. (2023) find that a resident's willingness to sort waste for a smart collection system depends heavily on perceived convenience and social norms rather than on the technology alone, and Teng et al. (2024) reach a similar conclusion in a broader study of digital technology adoption for sustainable cities, arguing that perceived usefulness and social influence typically matter more to uptake than the sophistication of the underlying system. On the routing side specifically, Barman and Bhunia (2024) show that combining GIS network analysis with locally adjusted road and traffic constraints, rather than using GIS output unmodified, produces meaningfully better transport route selections for municipal solid waste, a refinement that the GIS studies discussed below do not always build in.

Two specific benefits are argued for in this literature. The first is route efficiency. Abuga and Raghava (2021) built a real time bin monitoring system and argued that demand responsive collection, where a truck is sent only when a bin is actually near full rather than on a fixed schedule, cuts down on wasted trips, fuel use, and the resulting emissions. The second benefit is traceability that supports recovery rather than plain disposal. Addas et al. (2024) describe an integrated Internet of Things platform for waste management and argue that when segregation and collection events are logged digitally, it becomes far easier to track material from the household bin through to the recycling or composting stage, which supports the shift many countries are trying to make from a linear throw away model to a circular one where materials are reused.

At the same time, this literature is careful not to treat technology as a fix on its own. Misra et al. (2018) built and tested a cloud monitored IoT waste system and found that its practical value depended heavily on how well it was integrated into the existing municipal work routine, not just on the sensors themselves. Several Indian route optimisation studies make a similar point in a different way. Kanchanabhan et al. (2011) used GIS and vehicle tracking to redesign collection routes in Pallavaram municipality and found real gains in distance travelled, but only once the underlying bin locations and vehicle allocations were also fixed, since better data cannot correct a poorly designed physical system on its own. Khan and Samadder (2016) reached a similar conclusion for Dhanbad city, where optimised bin placement combined with route software produced the largest savings, again showing that digital tools work best alongside physical planning rather than as a stand alone patch. Sanjeevi and Shahabudeen (2016) extended this logic to Chennai, where GIS based routing across two hundred wards was used to identify the most efficient paths from generating wards to transfer stations, reinforcing the idea that digital route planning is most useful when paired with a sound network of transfer points.

Beyond Tirupati, several other Indian cities offer earlier examples of the same collection layer technology, and reading their record helps place Tirupati's own system in context rather than treating it as an isolated case. Indore, which has repeatedly topped the Swachh Survekshan rankings, began door to door collection in January 2016 as a pilot in two wards and reached full city coverage within about a year, using partitioned tipper vehicles and a GPS enabled tracking system where route deviations by drivers are flagged and penalised by a monitoring cell. Belgaum introduced RFID tags fixed to household doors, read by a handheld reader carried by sanitation workers, to log the date, time, and coverage of each collection round. Jaisalmer combined RFID cards with a citizen facing mobile application that sends a notification 5–10five to ten minutes before a collection vehicle arrives and lets residents view their own collection history or lodge a complaint if a visit is missed. Seen against this backdrop, Tirupati's own RFID and GPS combination is not a one off local invention but a fairly mature approach that has already been tested and refined across several Indian cities over roughly the past decade, which gives some confidence that the technology itself is not the limiting factor in how well it performs locally.

2.3 Waste composition, processing, and the case for decentralisation

India's municipal waste is dominated by organic material. Sharholy et al. (2008), in an early and still widely cited review of Indian cities, found that biodegradable waste typically makes up around forty percent of the total stream, alongside a large inert fraction and a smaller recyclable share, and argued that treatment strategy has to be built around this organic dominance rather than around plans copied from countries with different waste profiles. More recent figures from composting and biogas research put the biodegradable share even higher, at 50%–60fifty to sixty percent of total municipal waste (Panigrahi and Dubey, 2019).

Two recovery routes dominate the response to this organic share. The first is composting, which Ayilara et al. (2020) describe as a controlled, low cost way of turning organic waste into a soil conditioner, though they also flag persistent challenges around maintaining consistent compost quality and finding buyers for the finished product at scale, a concern echoed by Kumar and Agrawal (2020), who note that quality control remains one of the more stubborn barriers to scaling composting nationally in India. The second route is bio methanation, or controlled anaerobic digestion, which Panigrahi and Dubey (2019) describe as more capital intensive but capable of producing both a usable biogas and a digestate that can serve as fertiliser. Thomas and Soren (2020), reviewing waste to energy applications across India, argue that decentralised, smaller scale processing units placed closer to where waste is generated tend to perform better in Indian conditions than large centralised plants, mainly because they cut transport distance and are easier to match to the specific waste stream of a local market or neighbourhood.

2.4 Sustainability, resilience, and the equity of urban waste governance

A further strand of recent scholarship reads waste management explicitly through the lens of sustainability and urban resilience rather than treating it as a narrow engineering problem. Zucaro and Agostinho (2025), writing on urban sustainability more broadly, argue that resilient cities need to invest in smart infrastructure and waste to resource systems while also keeping citizens involved in decisions about how these systems are run, rather than treating technology adoption as a purely engineering problem. Randhawa et al. (2020), in a case study of Delhi's waste management choices, took a more critical stance, asking who actually gains and who loses when a city commits to a particular waste technology, and cautioned against assuming that a system that looks efficient on paper is automatically fair to the workers and informal recyclers who depend on the existing arrangement. He et al. (2026), studying community level waste work in Zhanjiang, China, looked at the issue from a social angle, arguing that engagement and education by frontline environmental workers matter as much as any sensor network in getting segregation and recycling to actually happen on the ground.

The smart governance and urban resilience literatures, read separately from the waste specific studies above, add two further pieces to this picture. Meijer and Bolívar (2016), in a widely cited review of smart urban governance, argue that the "smart" label is only earned when a city's technology investment is matched by a genuine change in how decisions are made and how citizens are involved, rather than being used simply to describe any city that has bought new hardware, a distinction this paper tries to respect by asking what Tirupati's tools actually change rather than simply listing them. Ghobakhloo (2020), writing on Industry 4.0 more broadly, makes a parallel argument for sustainability, namely that digitisation only becomes a sustainability gain once it is deliberately pointed at resource efficiency and emissions, rather than assumed to deliver these outcomes automatically as a side effect. On the resilience side, Belaïd et al. (2025), mapping the research landscape through a bibliometric review of the Web of Science database, find that governance and institutional capacity, not just physical infrastructure, are among the most consistently cited ingredients of a resilient city, while Yorucu et al. (2026) argue more specifically that resilient smart cities need sustained investment across multiple systems at once rather than a single flagship project, a point this paper's four layer account of Tirupati's system is built to test in miniature. Stanković et al. (2026), using a data envelopment analysis of European local governments, show that smart city initiatives can be benchmarked against each other on efficiency grounds in much the same spirit as Section 5 of this paper benchmarks Tirupati against other Indian cities, lending some methodological support to that kind of comparative exercise. Read together, these studies suggest that a resilient, sustainable approach to urban waste governance is incomplete unless it also asks about equity, about who is doing the underlying labour, and about whether citizen voice is genuinely built into the system, questions this paper returns to in its discussion. They also support the case for placing smart governance, sustainability, and resilience side by side as the three lenses through which Tirupati's system is read in this paper, rather than treating digitalisation as valuable in and of itself.

3 Study context

3.1 Tirupati and its sanitation load

Tirupati sits in the Chittoor district of Andhra Pradesh and functions as the largest urban local body in that district. As a pilgrim city built around the Tirumala temple, it receives a volume of visitors that is large relative to its resident population, which adds pressure on waste and sanitation infrastructure beyond what a city of similar resident size would normally face. According to figures reported by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, the city generates roughly 115 t per day of wet waste, 61 t per day of dry waste and recyclables, 15 t per day of food waste, 25 t per day of construction and demolition waste, 2 t per day of plastic waste, and 1 t per day of domestic hazardous waste. Wet waste is clearly the largest single stream, which matches the national pattern described by Sharholy et al. (2008) and later organic waste studies, and it explains why the corporation has put its processing emphasis on composting and bio methanation rather than on incineration. Figure 1 sets out this waste stream composition graphically.

Placed against the national picture, Tirupati's waste composition looks broadly typical for an Indian city of its size, with the organic, wet waste share dominating the total load in a way that matches the roughly 40%–60% biodegradable share reported across Indian cities generally (Sharholy et al., 2008; Panigrahi and Dubey, 2019). What sets Tirupati apart is less its waste composition and more the scale of seasonal and event driven variation created by pilgrim traffic, since visitor numbers can rise sharply during major festivals, which places short bursts of extra load on a system that has to be sized for an average day while still coping with these peaks. This context matters when reading efficiency claims, since a city built around a religious economy faces a genuinely different planning problem than a purely residential or industrial city of similar population.

3.2 The national policy scaffold

Tirupati's sanitation system operates inside a policy structure built at the national level. The Solid Waste Management Rules of 2016 require every waste generator to separate waste at the household level into wet, dry, and hazardous streams, and place a duty on local bodies to collect, process, and dispose of waste scientifically. The Swachh Bharat Mission Urban, and its second phase launched in October 2021, set the target of making every city garbage free by 2026, closing all open dumpsites, and remediating the legacy waste piled up in them. The Swachh Survekshan survey turns these targets into a yearly, comparable score. In its most recent large rounds it has combined field checks by trained assessors with citizen feedback gathered through more than fourteen million responses nationally, with citizen voice typically making up around a quarter of a city's total score. Because a meaningful share of a city's ranking rests on what citizens actually report through calls, an app, or an online form, cities have a direct incentive to build digital feedback channels that are easy to use and that produce a record officials can point to.

3.3 The smart cities mission layer

Tirupati is also a designated Smart City, which brought funding and technical support for an Integrated Command and Control Centre. This centre, built by NEC Corporation India in partnership with KELTRON at a project cost reported at around Rs 120 crore, links roughly 400 CCTV cameras across 135 locations, an adaptive traffic control system, automatic number plate recognition at select junctions, environmental sensors for air quality and weather, and a module for sanitation monitoring that includes automatic detection of illegal dumping. This centre also links to the Spandana citizen grievance platform run by the state government, giving officials a single dashboard where traffic, safety, environment, and sanitation data sit side by side. This layer is what allows the city to move from tracking sanitation on its own to treating it as one input among several in a broader picture of how the city is running at any given moment.

3.4 Why Tirupati is a useful test case

A city like Tirupati is useful for this kind of study precisely because it does not fit the profile of the megacities that dominate most published research on smart cities. Its population, while substantial, is a fraction of that of Mumbai, Delhi, or Bengaluru, and its municipal budget is correspondingly smaller, which means any digital tool it adopts has to justify its cost against a tighter set of alternatives. At the same time, its status as a major pilgrimage centre gives it a service load that is unusually demanding for its resident population size, closer in some ways to a much larger city during peak festival periods. This combination, a mid sized budget paired with a demanding and variable service load, describes the situation facing a large number of India's roughly four thousand urban local bodies far better than the situation facing a metropolitan capital, which is one reason this paper argues that Tirupati's experience travels further as a reference case than a study of Mumbai or Delhi alone would.

4 Materials and methods

This paper uses a qualitative, descriptive case study design built entirely from secondary sources. No survey, interview, or personally identifiable data was collected for this paper. Four categories of source were drawn on. The first is national policy and survey material, including Swachh Survekshan results, Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs press releases, and reports from the Central Pollution Control Board on solid waste management at the national level. The second is Smart Cities Mission material describing the Integrated Command and Control Centre and its components. The third is corporation level reporting carried in verified press coverage, including wire service reports and established news outlets, that describes specific figures such as vehicle counts, transfer points, and dumpsite remediation. The fourth is peer reviewed and grey literature on digital governance and smart waste management, used to interpret the case rather than to supply facts about Tirupati itself.

The analysis proceeds by mapping each documented digital tool to one or more of three outcome categories, namely operational efficiency, citizen facing service quality, and environmental sustainability, following the socio technical framing set out in Section 2. This mapping is descriptive. It organises what is known and proposes plausible links between digital tools and outcomes, but because the underlying data are aggregate, cross sectional, and drawn from official channels that have a natural interest in presenting good results, the paper does not claim to have established a causal effect. This is stated clearly and repeated in the discussion so that the descriptive nature of the evidence is not overstated.

4.1 Evidence identification and synthesis

Because the study draws wholly on existing documentation, the evidence was assembled through a structured, reproducible procedure rather than an ad hoc reading. Tirupati‑specific material was identified through the official portals of the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs and the Swachh Bharat Mission–Urban, the Swachh Survekshan results and the Swachh Survekshan 2023 Toolkit, Press Information Bureau releases, the Smart Cities Mission portal, and the 2011 Census, supplemented by reputable press reporting only where an official record was not publicly available. Interpretive and conceptual literature was included where it addressed digital public‑service delivery, smart or decentralised waste management, or urban resilience and equity; Tirupati‑specific items were retained only where they reported verifiable operational facts or official outcomes, and coaching‑aggregator pages and unsourced compilations were excluded. Every numerical and policy claim used in the results was then checked against, and cited to, its original government or municipal source, and where a figure could be traced to only one source that reliance is noted at the point of use. The verified facts were mapped to the three outcome categories and to the framework set out below; Table 1 records the provenance of each principal empirical claim. This procedure is reported for transparency and reproducibility rather than as a systematic review in the PRISMA sense, and it is designed to support description and testable propositions rather than causal inference.

Table 1. Source provenance for principal empirical claims.

4.2 A conceptual framework: Digital-Enabled Sanitation Resilience

To organise the mapping described above into something more than a list of tools and outcomes, this paper proposes a conceptual framework, termed here the Digital-Enabled Sanitation Resilience framework, that is purpose built for this case rather than borrowed wholesale from prior studies. Figure 2 sets this framework out visually. The framework reads left to right in four stages. The first stage is the digital tool layer itself, made up of the four components documented in Section 5: scan based collection tracking, GPS fitted logistics, the Integrated Command and Control Centre, and the Spandana grievance platform. The second stage is a set of three transmission mechanisms through which these tools are theorised to produce outcomes rather than simply existing alongside them: visibility and auditability, meaning that an action is turned into a checkable record; decentralisation, meaning that processing capacity is placed close to where waste is generated rather than centralised; and multi-channel access, meaning that a citizen facing tool remains usable by residents without a smartphone or steady data connection. The third stage is the three outcome domains used throughout this paper, namely operational efficiency, citizen facing service quality, and environmental sustainability. The fourth and outer stage is urban resilience itself, framed here not as a fourth outcome sitting beside the other three but as an emergent property of the whole system, one that depends on the first three outcomes holding up together under the variable, pilgrim driven load described in Section 3.

Two moderating conditions run underneath all four stages and are shown as a base layer in Figure 2. The first is workforce and processing capacity, since the literature reviewed in Section 2 is consistent that a digital layer without matching physical investment mostly produces better records of an unimproved problem (Misra et al., 2018; Thomas and Soren, 2020). The second is the digital divide, since a tool's benefits reach only the residents and workers who can use it, and a system that does not plan around this gap risks widening the very inequities it is meant to reduce (Dhungana et al., 2024; van Dijk and Hacker, 2003). Framing the model this way keeps sustainability, smart governance, and resilience as three lenses on the same underlying architecture rather than as three separate add on themes, and it gives future researchers a specific, testable structure, since each arrow in Figure 2 corresponds to a relationship that could in principle be measured with survey or sensor data even though this paper itself tests none of them directly.

5 Results

5.1 The four layer digital architecture

Reading across the sources described above shows a fairly clear four-layer structure to Tirupati's digital sanitation system.

At the collection layer, the corporation runs an Online Waste Management System integrated with radio frequency identification tags to track door to door collection in real time. A tag linked to a household or collection point is scanned by the worker or vehicle servicing it, and this scan is logged automatically to a central system, letting managers see which properties have been covered on a given day and which have not. Collection itself is carried out using colour coded auto tippers, known locally as Ghanta Gaddis, fitted with separate blue, green, and red compartments so that plastic, other dry waste, and wet waste are kept apart from the moment of collection rather than sorted later. This single design choice folds segregation directly into the collection step rather than leaving it to a later stage that depends on extra sorting labour.

At the logistics layer, secondary transport is handled by 57 vehicles serving 238 identified transfer points across the city, and these vehicles are GPS fitted so that their movement can be checked against planned routes. This matches the pattern described in route optimisation studies from other Indian cities, where GPS tracking is used less to redesign routes from scratch and more to confirm that planned routes are actually being followed day to day (Kanchanabhan et al., 2011; Sanjeevi and Shahabudeen, 2016).

At the integration layer, the Integrated Command and Control Centre draws together video feeds from around 400 cameras, GPS data from vehicles, and readings from environmental sensors covering air quality and weather, alongside a module built specifically to flag illegal dumping through video analytics. This centre gives the corporation a single place to view sanitation alongside traffic and safety data, rather than treating sanitation as a separate silo with its own reporting line.

At the citizen interface layer, complaints and feedback are routed through the Spandana platform, which is also accessible through municipal web and phone channels, so a resident is not required to use a smartphone app specifically to register a sanitation complaint. This design detail matters given the digital divide concerns raised by Dhungana et al. (2024) and by Reji et al. (2025), since keeping a phone based channel open protects residents who may not have reliable data access or comfort with a mobile application.

5.2 Processing infrastructure and its link to the digital layer

The data generated at collection and logistics feeds into a processing system built around decentralisation rather than one large central plant. The corporation runs six decentralised waste processing units located at three major markets and three gardens, aimed specifically at treating wet waste close to where it is generated. It also runs a bio methanation facility that converts organic waste into biogas and compost, a dedicated plastic waste facility fitted with a washing plant and an agglomerator machine for recycling low grade plastic, and a construction and demolition waste facility run with a private partner, Pro Enviro Solutions, with a reported capacity of 60 t per day. Recyclable plastic recovered through this system is sold to recyclers, while non recyclable plastic is sent for co processing at a cement plant rather than to landfill. This layout matches the argument made by Thomas and Soren (2020) that decentralised, smaller processing units suit Indian cities better than centralised plants, largely because they cut transport distance for the dominant wet waste stream and can be matched more closely to the specific waste generated at a market or garden.

The most visible environmental result of this combined system is the remediation of the Ramapuram dumpsite, which had accumulated roughly two lakh tonnes of legacy waste over past decades. Official figures put the reclaimed land at approximately 25.65 acres following full remediation of the site. This kind of dumpsite clearance is exactly the outcome that Swachh Bharat Mission Urban 2.0 sets as a national target, since the mission commits to remediating all legacy dumpsites and converting them into green space.

5.3 Operational efficiency outcomes

The clearest efficiency claim on record is full door to door coverage, described in official material as reaching every gate in the city, with the RFID based tracking system offered as the specific proof for this claim rather than a general assurance. This claim rests on a workforce reported at close to one thousand sanitation workers, alongside the 57 secondary vehicles and 238 transfer points already noted. The available secondary sources do not include figures for cost per tonne collected, average time to complete a route, or worker productivity, so this paper cannot calculate efficiency in the way a cost accounting study would. What can be said is that the specific combination of real time collection tracking, GPS logistics, and a shared control centre matches the structural features that the smart waste management literature associates with lower routing waste and more reliable coverage (Sosunova and Porras, 2022; Abuga and Raghava, 2021).

5.4 Environmental outcomes

Three lines of evidence point to environmental gains. First, source segregation is built into the collection hardware itself through the three chambered auto tippers, which separate wet, dry, and hazardous waste from the point of generation rather than after collection. Second, the combination of six decentralised units, a bio methanation plant, and a dedicated plastic facility diverts a large share of the dominant wet waste stream towards composting and biogas rather than towards a landfill, and shortens the distance waste has to travel before treatment (Panigrahi and Dubey, 2019). Third, and most visible to the public, is the Ramapuram dumpsite remediation, which cleared roughly two lakh tonnes of legacy waste and returned close to twenty six acres of land for other municipal use. Together these three lines of evidence describe a shift away from simple dumping and towards the recovery oriented model that the wider literature on Indian municipal solid waste treats as the direction cities need to move in given how organic heavy the national waste stream is (Sharholy et al., 2008; Ayilara et al., 2020).

5.5 Citizen facing outcomes

Citizen facing outcomes are harder to measure directly from the sources available for this paper, but two structural features support them. The first is the transparency created by RFID verified collection, which in principle gives residents and officials alike a record they can check rather than a claim they have to take on trust. The second is the grievance pathway through Spandana and parallel phone and web channels, which closes the loop between a resident noticing a problem and an official record of that complaint.

These features are best read as enabling conditions for citizen‑facing quality rather than as evidence of citizen satisfaction, which the sources available for this study do not measure directly. In particular, a strong Swachh Survekshan position cannot be treated as a proxy for satisfaction. The Swachh Survekshan 2023 result is a composite of three components: Service Level Progress, Certification (the Garbage Free City star rating and Water Plus status), and Citizen’s Voice and direct citizen feedback enters only as one sub‑item within the Citizen’s Voice component. A high overall rank is therefore, at most, a weak and indirect signal of how residents actually experience the service, and this paper does not attribute citizen satisfaction to the digital tools. Establishing whether RFID‑verified transparency and the Spandana grievance pathway genuinely raise satisfaction would require resident‑level survey or complaint‑resolution data, which we identify as a task for future research.

5.6 The ranking trajectory in context

Tirupati's presence among the country's cleaner cities is not a one off result. The city was already placed among the top ten cleanest cities in the 2017 round of Swachh Survekshan, and by the 2023 cycle it had reached eighth position among cities with a population above one lakh, alongside its five star Garbage Free City and Water Plus certification. This trajectory continued into the ninth edition of the survey, covering 2024 to 2025, when the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs introduced a Super Swachh League to recognise cities with a sustained record of strong performance separately from the regular yearly ranking. Tirupati was named to this League within the 50,000 to 3 lakh population band, alongside the New Delhi Municipal Council, which is a marker of consistency across cycles rather than a single good year. This multi year pattern lines up in time with the build out of the RFID system, the GPS logistics layer, and eventually the Integrated Command and Control Centre, which more recent reporting describes as having gone fully live in 2026 as part of an expanded rollout that included additional camera coverage and traffic modules. Figure 3 sets out this trajectory across cycles. This timing is consistent with the idea that digital tools have supported sustained performance, but it is only that, a consistency, because a Swachh Survekshan score is shaped by many factors at once, including workforce size, citizen awareness campaigns, weather, and assessor judgement, and no comparison city without similar digital tools is available in this study to serve as a counterfactual.

5.7 Tirupati compared with other Indian cities

Reading Tirupati's Swachh Survekshan record next to other Indian cities helps place its performance in a national frame rather than treating an eighth place finish or a Super Swachh League listing as numbers without context. Table 2 sets out selected cities across different population bands, drawing on official Swachh Survekshan results and press coverage of the 2023 and 2024 to 2025 cycles.

Table 2. Swachh Survekshan cleanliness rankings, selected Indian cities (2023 and 2024–25).

Cities recognised in the Super Swachh League for consistent performance; the League was introduced in the 2024–25 cycle and cities within it were not assigned a numbered rank for that cycle.

Swachh Survekshan 2023 used a broader population banding (above/below one lakh) than the five-tier system introduced in 2024–25; Tirupati's population places it in the 50,000–3 lakh band under the revised scheme. Source: Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (2024); Press Information Bureau (2024, 2025); Drishti IAS (2025).

This comparison is descriptive rather than evaluative. The cities in Table 2 were selected because they publicly document scan‑based or platform‑mediated collection systems broadly comparable to Tirupati’s, with Indore included as the long‑standing national front‑runner; they are illustrative technology comparators, not a matched sample. The table situates Tirupati among peers that deploy similar tools, but it does not benchmark the effect of those tools and should not be read as showing that Tirupati’s digital system caused its relative standing. Cities differ in scale, fiscal capacity, institutional history, and socioeconomic profile, and the same tools can produce different outcomes under those conditions, so any apparent association between a city’s toolset and its ranking is offered only as context for the present case rather than as causal benchmarking.

Read across Table 2, three patterns stand out. First, Tirupati's performance sits inside a wider Andhra Pradesh cluster; Vijayawada reached the Super Swachh League in the above ten lakh population band and Guntur did so in the three to ten lakh band in the same 2024 to 2025 cycle, suggesting that Tirupati's result is not an isolated local success but part of a state level pattern of investment in sanitation governance. Second, Tirupati's own population band, 50,000 to 3 lakh, is dominated by smaller cantonment and satellite towns such as the New Delhi Municipal Council and Ambikapur, which suggests that a temple city with Tirupati's pilgrim driven service load is competing successfully against places with a structurally simpler service demand. Third, the very largest cities, Indore, Surat, and Navi Mumbai, have occupied the top of the Super Swachh League for seven or more consecutive years, which sets a useful benchmark for how long a genuinely resilient sanitation system needs to sustain its performance before it can be called consistent rather than lucky.

Reading Tirupati next to Indore, Belgaum, and Jaisalmer at the level of technology, rather than ranking, helps show what is shared across these systems and what is specific to Tirupati. All four cities rely on the same basic pairing of a scan based collection log with GPS fitted vehicles, which suggests this combination has become something close to a commonly reported combination for Indian cities pursuing a high Swachh Survekshan score rather than a special local invention. Where Tirupati differs is in how far its integration layer goes. Indore's system, at least as described in public material, centres mainly on collection and route monitoring, while Tirupati folds sanitation data into a citywide Integrated Command and Control Centre that also covers traffic, safety, and environmental sensing, giving its sanitation department a place inside a larger, shared operations picture rather than a standalone monitoring system. This wider integration is itself a product of Tirupati's Smart City status and the scale of investment that came with it, a resource not every Tier II city can assume it will have. Figure 4 sets these comparative figures out visually alongside the ranking data in Table 2.

6 Discussion

Four points stand out from putting these results together.

The first is that in Tirupati's case, digitalisation appears to work mainly by turning an invisible service into a checkable one. An RFID scan does not sweep a street or lift a bin. What it does is create a timestamped record that a specific action happened at a specific place, and that record is what lets a manager, an auditor, or a Swachh Survekshan assessor confirm a claim rather than simply hear it. This lines up closely with the argument Cordella and Tempini (2015) make about digital tools solving an old accountability problem in public services, and with Tangi et al. (2021) point that the value of a digital reform often lies in what it makes visible to managers rather than in the underlying task itself changing. Seen this way, the RFID system, the GPS units, and the Integrated Command and Control Centre are best understood as an information layer sitting on top of a physical system, not a replacement for the physical system.

The second point is that this information layer only pays off because it sits alongside real investment in workforce and processing capacity. A city could install the same tags and the same cameras and see far less benefit if it lacked the roughly one thousand sanitation workers, the six decentralised processing units, or the bio methanation and plastic recovery facilities that Tirupati has built up. This matches a repeated finding across the smart waste literature, that digital monitoring without matching investment in physical capacity mostly produces better records of an unchanged problem rather than an actually improved outcome (Misra et al., 2018; Thomas and Soren, 2020). The decision to build segregation into the auto tipper itself, through its three separate compartments, is a good example of a design choice that does not rely on residents changing their behaviour through willpower alone, since the sorting happens at the point of collection regardless of how carefully a household has separated its own waste beforehand.

The third point, and the one this paper wants to stress rather than gloss over, is the equity question raised throughout the digital governance literature. Dhungana et al. (2024) found that a digital divide can blunt the benefits of e governance for exactly the residents who might need those benefits most, and Reji et al. (2025) describe this same tension playing out at the national scale in India. A grievance system that only works through a smartphone app would risk reproducing this problem locally in Tirupati. The fact that Spandana is paired with phone and web channels, rather than standing alone, is therefore not a minor detail but a genuine safeguard, and any future expansion of the city's digital tools should be judged partly on whether it keeps this kind of multi channel access rather than narrowing towards app only interaction.

A further point worth raising, even though the sources used for this paper do not describe it as a live problem in Tirupati specifically, is the data governance and cybersecurity load that comes with running a centre like the Integrated Command and Control Centre. National guidance for these centres now includes dedicated advisories on cybersecurity protocols and standard operating procedures, reflecting a recognition at the policy level that a system pulling together camera feeds, vehicle locations, and sanitation records into one dashboard also creates a single point of failure if that system is poorly secured (National Institute of Urban Affairs, n.d.). A sanitation system that has become dependent on a centralised digital layer for its day to day monitoring needs that layer to be resilient, not just informative, and this is a cost of digitalisation that discussions of efficiency and citizen satisfaction can easily leave out if they focus only on the benefits side of the ledger.

Taken together, these four points suggest a fairly specific contribution for this paper. Much of the existing literature on smart waste management is written either at the scale of a large metropolitan city or at the scale of a single sensor or algorithm tested in a lab or a small pilot area. This paper instead offers an integrated account of one mid sized, religiously significant city, built from real, checkable figures rather than modelled estimates, and it proposes a simple three part framework, covering efficiency, citizen experience, and environmental outcome, that other researchers working on similar Tier II Indian cities could use as a starting template for their own studies, whether through survey work, cost data, or sensor logs.

7 Conclusion

This paper set out to describe how digitalisation is associated with sanitation service delivery in Tirupati Municipal Corporation and to connect that description to the city's recorded performance, reading the case through the three connected lenses of environmental sustainability, smart governance, and urban resilience. Drawing only on verifiable government releases, press coverage, and peer reviewed literature published mostly within the last decade, it identified four linked digital tools, an RFID based collection tracking system, GPS fitted secondary transport, an Integrated Command and Control Centre, and the Spandana grievance platform, and mapped these tools, through the Digital-Enabled Sanitation Resilience framework proposed in Section 4, against three outcome areas: operational efficiency, citizen facing service quality, and environmental sustainability. The evidence available shows that these tools appear to work mainly by making a previously invisible service auditable, which is itself a foundation for smart governance, and that their apparent benefits are tied closely to non digital investments such as workforce strength and decentralised processing capacity, echoing a point made repeatedly in the wider literature on smart waste management. Tirupati's sustained strong performance in the Swachh Survekshan rankings, its listing in the 2024 to 2025 Super Swachh League, and its remediation of a major legacy dumpsite, are consistent with this account, though they cannot be treated as proof of it given the descriptive, single city nature of the data used here. Read together, these results suggest that urban resilience in a mid sized, pilgrim driven city is less about any single sensor or dashboard and more about whether efficiency, citizen experience, and environmental outcomes can be sustained together, cycle after cycle. The clearest next step for this line of research is primary data collection, whether through citizen and worker surveys or through access to raw operational data, so that the relationships sketched in this paper can be tested rather than only described.

8 Limitations

This paper has clear limits that should shape how its conclusions are read. All figures relating to Tirupati come from official releases and press coverage of those releases, sources that have a natural interest in presenting the city's performance favourably, and no independent audit of these figures was available for this paper. The design is a single city, cross sectional case study, so it cannot show cause and effect, and it cannot be generalised automatically to other cities without their own local investigation. No primary data, such as household surveys, worker interviews, or direct sensor logs, were collected, which means the citizen experience and efficiency claims in this paper rest on inference from official scores rather than on direct measurement.

A further limitation worth naming plainly is the risk of favourable reporting bias built into official channels. A Swachh Survekshan score, a press release from the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, and a municipal corporation's own account of its systems are all produced by parties with a direct interest in the city being seen to perform well, and while multiple independent outlets repeating the same figures offers some reassurance, it does not amount to independent verification in the way that field measurement or third party audit would. This paper has tried to manage that risk by refusing to add numbers that are not on record anywhere and by flagging clearly, throughout the results and discussion, that the evidence presented is consistent with a positive account rather than proof of one. Readers, and especially other researchers hoping to build on this paper, should treat every figure here as a documented claim rather than as an independently confirmed fact.

This paper is also bounded in scope in ways worth stating explicitly. It deals with municipal solid waste, that is, the household, commercial, and construction streams that Tirupati's four digital tools are built around, and says nothing about electronic waste, which is a fast growing and largely separate stream in Indian cities with its own informal recycling sector, regulatory gaps, and health concerns (Kannan et al., 2016; Jaiswal and Mukti, 2025). A full account of Tirupati's environmental performance would eventually need to bring e-waste into the picture, particularly as smartphone and electronics use continues to rise even in a mid sized city. More broadly, the wider literature on waste mismanagement across developing countries, surveyed by Ferronato and Torretta (2019), and the country level account of India's waste challenges given by Kumar et al. (2017), both suggest that a positive single city case like this one sits inside a national picture that remains difficult in many other respects, from informal sector labour conditions to inconsistent enforcement of the 2016 Solid Waste Management Rules, and this paper does not attempt to speak to that larger picture beyond noting that it exists.

9 What this means for practice—recommendations

For a municipal manager reading this paper rather than another researcher, a few practical lessons follow from the discussion above. Building segregation into the collection vehicle itself, as Tirupati has done with its three chambered auto tippers, removes a point of failure that depends on household behaviour and is worth prioritising ahead of more elaborate sensor networks. Pairing any RFID or GPS system with a genuine, adequately staffed workforce and nearby processing capacity matters more than the sophistication of the tracking technology itself. Keeping a non digital channel open alongside any app based grievance system protects the portion of residents who cannot or do not wish to use a smartphone for this purpose, and this should be treated as a permanent design requirement rather than a temporary bridge to be phased out once app adoption rises. Finally, as a city's monitoring systems become more centralised through a facility like an Integrated Command and Control Centre, the routine security and maintenance of that facility should be budgeted for with the same seriousness as the sensors and cameras that feed into it, since a centre that goes down or is compromised removes the very accountability benefit that justified building it in the first place.

10 Future research

Future work should address these gaps stated in limitations of the study directly. A structured survey of residents and sanitation workers would let researchers measure satisfaction, perceived transparency, and actual usage of the Spandana platform, and would allow the three part framework proposed here to be tested statistically rather than only described. Access to raw sensor and route data, including collection times, distances travelled, and time taken to close a logged complaint, would let researchers calculate real efficiency measures and compare periods before and after a specific digital tool was introduced. A comparison across several Tier II Indian cities with differing levels of digital adoption would help test how much of Tirupati's performance is due to its digital tools specifically as opposed to its workforce size, its religious tourism revenue, or other local factors. Such studies would move the evidence in this space from the descriptive, pattern level account offered here to the kind of tested, comparative evidence that municipal planners and researchers in this field currently lack.

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Supplementary material

The Supplementary material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frsc.2026.1930465/full#supplementary-material

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Footnotes

Edited by: Wei Li, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China

Reviewed by: Arvind Dwivedi, Royal Global University, India

Aria Gusti, Andalas University, Indonesia