1. Introduction

5In India, the launch of the “100 Smart Cities Mission” in 2015 has played an accelerating role in the push for digital innovations in urban governance (Parkar, Zérah, and Mittal 2023). If transport has been the main area for the deployment of digital applications, solid waste management, along with energy and surveillance, has not been far behind. To fast-track projects, each Smart City has to incorporate a special purpose vehicle (SPV) to implement the mission at the local level, adding a layer to a complex municipal governance (Prasad, Alizadeh, and Dowling 2021; Khan, Taraporevala, and Zérah 2018). Mangaluru was selected as a “Smart City” in 2016, and its SPV, Mangaluru Smart City Limited (MSCL), was established in 2017. The SPV is in charge of implementing a digital component in MCC’s collection and transport of solid waste.

6Based on our grounded analysis in Mangaluru, the paper makes three arguments. First, the digitalization of the SWM system results in the entry of several new private players, such as local system integrators and technology vendors that transform procurement and contract management. It also ends up complicating an already fragmented urban governance as SWM is now being embedded in a dual governance structure of Smart City and municipal corporation. Second, solid waste collection is a highly labor-intensive sector and the digital solutions adopted are neither suitable for the working conditions nor are they sufficiently deployed to bring effective change in the collection. Third, the imagination of a one-stop online grievance redressal system as a game changer is misplaced since it does not improve (and might even aggravate) the trust deficit among the residents.

7The paper is based on qualitative fieldwork undertaken during two visits in February and April 2022 and a follow-up visit in January 2023. Repeated interviews (more than 40) with various stakeholders were conducted to trace the perception and the evolution of the project over time. The stakeholders included officials in MCC and Smart City, local politicians, and the employees of consultants, vendors, and contractors involved in the project. Interviews with the waste collectors employed by the private company handling SWM, and participation in a training session organized for them were central to assessing how digitalization impacts labor. The fieldwork also included observation of the operations at ICCC, one of the solid waste collection points, and at the landfill site. The paper, however, is mainly focused on the collection of waste and does not include the potential impact of digitalization on treatment and recycling.

8The rest of the paper is divided into six sections. The second section presents the justifications for the digitalization in the SWM sector, and its adoption in Mangaluru by the Smart City. Third and fourth sections discuss how various digital components are being implemented by a range of new actors but have limited impacts in finding solutions to sectoral issues. The fifth section focuses on the impacts on workers having to use a scanning device to prove that the waste is being collected, and on the perception of this practice by the administration and the private companies. The sixth section critically highlights the absence of residents from the conception and implementation of this project, while the seventh section provides concluding remarks.

2. Rationale for digitalizing solid waste management in Mangaluru

9Solid waste management emerged as a major urban governance issue in Indian cities in the mid-1990s (Chaturvedi and Gidwani 2010; Doron and Jeffrey 2018; Furedy 1995). Following the Supreme Court of India’s decision in the Almitra Patel case, a Public Interest Litigation against municipalities that were not collecting waste, the Solid Waste Management Rules were enacted in 2000 and later amended in 2016 (Ahluwalia and Patel 2018). These rules laid down basic duties of the local bodies and waste generators (Reddy and Kumar 2018). They also recommended that a technical modernization of the sector should go hand in hand with organizational changes to remedy issues such as the lack of public awareness, inadequate infrastructure, poor institutional capacity, and financial constraints (Sharholy et al. 2008; Kumar et al. 2017). Consequently, in the last three decades, many changes have been introduced by municipalities to streamline the governance of SWM. They include the subcontracting of collection and transport to private players (Hanrahan, Srivastava, and Ramakrishna 2006), the involvement of residents in segregation and door-to-door collection (Kudva 2013), or even, as is the case in Pune, the formalization of waste workers (Chikarmane 2012). More recently, a new set of reforms focuses on the use of digital technology. Advocates of these interventions argue that this would lead to better management and efficient service delivery as well as stronger monitoring, tracing, and surveillance of private operators and workers (Joshi and Ahmed 2016; Sharholy et al. 2018).

13As with many other Smart Cities in India, the ICCC is the nerve center of all the ICT-based interventions (Praharaj 2020). The ICCC dashboard is supposed to provide a bird’s-eye view of the city’s SWM by displaying daily information on the number of waste collectors working, the number of properties covered, the number of vehicles plying their routes, and the amount of waste collected. The ICCC personnel can check these data on their monitors and alert the Antony Waste supervisors if they find any issues.

We have come up with a robust solution, a way through which citizens can complain and all the vehicles are fitted with GPS and geofencing... the Smart Cities Mission guidelines provide that we should have IT solutions for pan-city solutions, therefore we have chosen to digitalize the solid-waste-management system. All Smart Cities in Karnataka have more or less chosen similar projects... ITMS [Integration Traffic Management System], SWM, Environment and Disaster Management and Emergency … there was a push from the state.... (January 27, 2023)

3. Effects of digitalization on sectoral and city governance

16There is a wide consensus among scholars that the digitalization of urban infrastructure has coincided with the corporatization of urban governance (Söderström, Paasche, and Klauser 2020; Rebentisch et al. 2020). Söderström et al. (2020) argue that the Smart Cities narrative has been captured by private companies, who instead of providing a spatialized planning solution to urban problems, propose an optimization of city systems and infrastructures through code. Companies such as IBM, Siemens, and Cisco act as urban consultancy firms and reduce complex urban issues to management problems (McNeill 2015) that can be easily solved with the idea of “solution” (Wiig 2015; Hollands 2008; Kitchin 2015). Similarly, in the Indian case, even though consultants played a key role in previous urban missions (Sadoway et al. 2018), Smart Cities have led to an increased reliance on a wide range of consultants (Purandare 2021; Khan et al. 2018), especially IT consultants, as an effect of the digital turn spearheaded by the Smart Cities Mission (Parkar and Purandare 2023). These IT-driven solutions are often packaged as simple, clean, and one-size-fit-all fixes for complex social settings (Ho 2017).

New kids on the block: local system integrators and vendors

18In this context, we argue that digitalization along with SCM brings in two important changes. The first change is of an institutional nature with a shift towards a corporate form of governance. In addition to the establishment of a SPV, which is registered under the companies’ act, Smart Cities also have to appoint project management consultants (PMCs) for the overall assistance in design, development, supervision, management, and procurement of projects. In Mangaluru, there are multiple consultants for different projects. StepnStones, a Bengaluru-based company specializing in IT/ICT solutions, is the PMC for all digital applications that are integrated in the ICCC infrastructure. Since the Smart City has a limited number of employees with an IT background, StepnStones works closely with the Smart City Deputy General Manager for IT, who is himself employed by the SPV on a contractual basis.

20Unlike Antony Waste’s role as a contractor for MCC, which has been a standard in Indian cities for the last two decades, the presence of companies such as Trinity, Datatronics, and Madras Printers brings in a new category of private actors to urban governance. Local system integration through a chain of vendors introduces a major shift. These vendors provide very specific ICT-based tools to the cities, calling them “solutions.” Not only this turn in governance has rarely been paid attention to, the difference that technology vendors bring in urban management is also hardly understood. When asked about the distinction between a contractor and a vendor, an engineer from Smart City gave us the following definition:

A contractor is someone who gets one’s hands dirty, otherwise one thing will not move. And a vendor is someone who sits in an A.C. room. (February 1, 2023).

21This quote is not isolated. Other engineers express this perception in other words, hinting at the idea that technology vendors conceive, design, and supply digital interventions but are not in touch with ground realities, whereas contractors are involved on the ground and understand the local conditions well. What these observations also point out is their sense of government officials’ lack of control over these actors, which is partly related to their skills as public works engineers that leave them ill-equipped to supervise these new types of digital projects.

4. Limited results of a complexified decision-making process

22Since the introduction of the digitalization project, collection of solid waste in Mangaluru has been embedded in a dual institutional framework which can be described as being made up of the Urban Local Body / Contractor on the one hand, and the Smart City / Vendors on the other (Figure 3). This means that contracts, procurements, and accountability are dealt with through two different institutional routes. In the following paragraphs we trace the implementation of the GPS/Geofencing and QR codes components of the project to assess how this relationship plays out.

The GPS/geofencing component: duplication of infrastructure and ill-fitted digital features

23The GPS/Geofencing “instrument” is considered both by the Smart City and the Municipal Commissioner as a success, leading to a more transparent tracking of vehicles. We find that the GPS component embodies the issue of duplication of infrastructure. This component requires the installation of GPS devices in all of Antony Waste’s waste-collecting vehicles. However, the contractor has its own GPS devices already attached to them (field notes, March 31, 2022). According to Antony Waste’s employees, though the Smart City informed the contractor about the digitalization project, the details of the design were not shared. While meetings are held that include the consultant and the vendors, during these meetings Smart City officials merely check the status of project implementation rather than discussing processes that underline them. The meetings and discussions are also irregular and uneven. According to a senior Antony Waste employee, while they were called for the initial meetings, later the Smart City stopped inviting them. Consequently, the chain of nested companies formed by StepnStones, and the Smart City technology vendors involved in designing digital interventions ended up replicating the GPS infrastructure of Antony Waste, incurring additional costs to collect data that was already being collected by the contractor before digitalization. Such incidents highlight a lack of coordination among various actors that neither the municipal corporation nor the Smart City acknowledges or considers as an issue since they understand them as two different projects and contracts.

24Further, aside from redundant infrastructure, some of the features that were planned have not been implemented, revealing the disconnect between design and execution. Trinity had intended to implement a ward-level geofence. The goal of this feature was to compare the effectiveness of a ward’s waste-collection operation to that of other wards. The main idea was to geofence the 60 existing wards so that no truck could go and collect from another ward. However, Antony Waste objected to the project’s geofencing feature since it was difficult to adhere to ward-level boundaries given that their routes for waste collection crisscrossed different wards. As the employee of the local system integrator (Madras Printers) mentioned, Antony Waste’s demand was accepted since this is a simple feature to disable in the application. However, what it highlights is the techno-fetishism pushed through the consultant and the vendor. They assumed that the digitalization would almost “naturally” solve the issue of the lack of monitoring of solid waste movement, without understanding the complexity of the urban fabric, where the neat boundaries of ward maps may not hold much meaning for the delivery of an urban service. This illustrates two ways of seeing the city. For tech companies it is a “solution” that is easily scalable and relates to an understanding of the city as a flat space, while a contractor, who operates in a complex urban fabric made of neighborhoods and different groups of citizens, understands the city as a rhythm that require constant, daily adjustments.

The QR code component: complexification of the decision-making process with very limited impact

25A careful analysis of the QR code component raises another set of issues. It demonstrates how the projected simple and straightforward image of an automated future of cities does not remain as seamless when implemented. At the time of the preparation of the initial detailed project report, an RFID (Radio-Frequency Identification) system was preferred for the purpose of scanning instead of a QR code system. RFID has been used in many cities and was favored by Smart City’s Deputy General Manager for IT, but due to debates on the cost of the solution and its requirements (such as real-time internet connectivity in scanning devices), this technology was abandoned. Understanding these choices is very important because they show how “solutions” that appear as evident are actually contested and debated, but once chosen they lock an entire sector into implementing them. The knowledge that the consultants and vendors are assumed to hold gives them power in the municipal space. However, while this chain of implementation agency (Smart City), consultants (StepnStones), local system integrator, and vendors (Madras Printers, Trinity, and Datatronics) seems to be a well-organized way of delivering the project, the one crucial element that is often overlooked is that none of them is involved in day-to-day SWM service delivery.

26Moreover, the functioning of the QR code requires some coordination in administration. The SCM guidelines do not shed much light on the intricacies of the responsibilities that arise when the Smart City intervention is applied to the existing system. Trinity and Antony Waste engage with each other for various SWM-related tasks. Trinity’s employees conduct training sessions for Antony Waste’s collectors. Similarly, Antony Waste provides Trinity with feedback about the on-ground operations of its technologies. However, these tasks are not specifically provided in either of these companies’ contracts. Yet, both Antony Waste’s collectors scanning the QR codes and Trinity’s operation of dashboard in ICCC are critical for the success (or failure) of the project. Because of this dual structure, the smooth functioning of the project is dependent on the interpersonal rapport between Trinity and Antony Waste’s employees, and the ability of MCC and Smart City officials to ensure that these interactions take place. From a pure institutional reading, these interactions fall in a gray area and depend upon the rapport between these two private companies. The absence of contractual relationships also means the absence of organizational tools and processes that would help with coordination. These relationships can hardly be documented in any formal way and result in speculation and rumors regarding the main goal of digitalization among the various stakeholders. From a larger theoretical viewpoint, this could be read as an expression of the idea of “informality” as a tactic to allow for flexibility and ad-hoc decisions (Roy 2009). However, we argue that this fuzzy decision-making process is better understood as an embodiment of the recurrent tension within India’s urban governance between the formal (but complex) institutional structures and the importance of key officials’ agency (Zérah 2020).

27The collection of QR code data is dependent on several other factors. The workers employed by Antony Waste are responsible for the day-to-day scanning of the QR codes and they face several hurdles while collecting this data, causing complications to their already physically arduous jobs. These workers are often blamed for the failures of the project. The next section discusses the implications of digitalization in a labor-intensive sector.

5. The paradoxes of digitalizing a labor-intensive basic service

28Globally, Solid Waste Management is an area of work where the workers are likely to come from marginalized communities (Beall 2022; Blincow 1986; Hartmann 2012; Poletto et al. 2016; Uhunamure, Edokpayi, and Shale 2021). In India, workers directly handling waste mostly come from historically stigmatized communities intertwined with caste-based hierarchy (De Bercegol and Gowda 2019; Gill 2009; Harris-White 2020). In Mangaluru, waste workers are made up of people from scheduled caste and scheduled tribe communities. Though the digitalization of SWM is an IT project, the data fed into the system is generated through a labor-intensive process of scanning every premise from where waste is collected. That makes it highly dependent on the workers and the constraints they face on the ground since they are the ones who have to scan the QR codes at each household. Waste collectors employed by Antony Waste follow a designated route to collect waste in their allotted neighborhoods. The collection is done by groups of two (sometimes three) workers: one gathers the waste in buckets and puts it in the truck, while the other drives the vehicle.

29The successful functioning of the digitalization project is contingent on the routine scanning of the QR codes. Thus, the waste collectors are the most critical component of this solution. However, these workers face many impediments on the ground. When asked if the scanning of QR codes was working, one of the Antony Waste supervisors said:

See, this is dependent on the waste collectors. On some days they scan the codes, while on others they ignore it. For instance, on Fridays, which is the dry waste collection day, it is a very busy day for the workers. … there is a heavy workload for them, so they don’t have much time to scan. On other days they scan “fully” (sic). In some areas there are connectivity issues. … in those areas scanning does not happen often. (March 30, 2022)

Many times, they [workers] have two buckets in which they “hold the waste” and then they have to hold this device in their hands. … so, there are many problems. Now [in March] it is still okay but imagine the same situation during the monsoon. … [the workers face] too many issues while collecting waste. The device can get drenched in the rain. The workers can slip. Majority of Mangaluru landscape (around 70%) is hilly, streets are narrow. There are many areas where there are no roads. If workers fall in these areas, then the device can stop working. (March 30, 2022)

31The waste collectors are required to do a lot of ergonomic maneuvering to scan the QR codes. Often, they have to walk twice toward the house: once to collect the waste, and again to scan the code. These actions are further complicated by Mangaluru’s geographical conditions. The abundant rains and steep roads make carrying heavy loads difficult. Moreover, neither MCC nor the Smart City provide charging facilities for the scanning devices. Most of the workers live in informal settlements with poor access to electricity. Still they have to bear the burden of charging the devices at home. These issues make it clear that the project is far from being a “solution” to the material and social conditions of waste collection work.

32The physically grueling nature of waste collection does not go unnoticed by the vendors. In an interview, an employee of Madras Printers precisely described how it was difficult for workers to optimize their movements since their “hands are occupied” (interview with an employee of Madras Printers, January 27, 2023). However, despite this apparent understanding, he still partly laid blame on workers whom he considered as averse to technology. There is a shared belief among the vendors, the Smart City, and municipal corporation officials that “they [workers] want to run away from the technology” as “we [Smart City] never anticipated that they would not scan. We thought there would be 100% scan” (interview with an engineer from the Smart City, February 1, 2023). Thus, any flaw in the digitalization project is attributed to poor implementation by the waste collectors.

33These allegations portray the socially disconnected characteristic of the digital solution as subjective unwillingness on the part of the workers. According to the vendors, the app should have worked because they had piloted and tailored the solution to the city’s needs. They also consider that regular training is a solution to the problems on the ground. However, our observations, and discussions with supervisors who worked in other cities, show how these training sessions are inadequate. They act as a formality in educating workers about the App. We observed that in training: a Trinity employee would bring one device to show workers how to use it, and most of them were not even able to see what was happening on the screen.

34Moreover, even if the workers learned how to use the app, most of the times they just memorized the navigation, and later got stuck if somehow the navigation did not work as they remembered. The app is only available in English, making even simple navigation a nightmare for the marginalized workers with less educated backgrounds. Furthermore, these sessions are done off-site, instead of accompanying the workers on their waste collection routes. The lack of on-site training that would help the app designers to better grasp the material working conditions remains a key loophole. It means that the clunkiness of digitalization is not considered and instead the workers are treated as the weakest link.

6. Digitalization: an instrument for accountability and a transparent social compact?

35One of the various arguments put forward for digitalization is the role it can play in improving accountability by making governance practices more transparent and accessible to citizens. SCM seeks to improve accountability by “using mobile services to reduce cost of services and providing services without having to go to municipal offices” (Ministry of Urban Development 2015:7). We understand the idea of accountability as the ability for residents to understand the shifts in the delivery of basic services and their capacity to put forward their grievances. The digitalization of SWM in Mangaluru promises to set up a one-stop grievance redressal mechanism through the OneTouch Mangaluru app in order to make the system more accountable and enable everyone to file their grievances. However, a close inquiry into how this mechanism works indicates otherwise.

A low-level awareness of a partially digitalized collection system

36Most of the people we met during our fieldwork were unaware about the use of QR codes installed on their properties. For example, a resident (who happens to be a retired state-level bureaucrat and ex-member of Karnataka’s legislative assembly) thought that the QR codes were installed as a part of data collection undertaken by the state education department. A former ward councilor thought they were for the purpose of providing gas connection to residents. Another person thought that these codes had been installed for property tax purposes. Some people were also suspicious of the exercise. For example, a resident thought the information was being collected under the recent controversial amendments to India’s citizenship laws.

37Such lack of information is not simply an issue of awareness but of trust deficit and informed consent. Digital-based interventions necessitate heavy and invasive data collection and this is bound to create confusion and even cause anxiety among the residents, especially in a religious conflict-ridden city like Mangaluru. In the absence of awareness and consent among the public, the whole exercise of data collection becomes problematic and also results in partial or fragmented data. The unawareness about the use of QR codes also resulted in many people being skeptical about their installations. The proprietor of Datatronics, the sub-vendor who was hired to install the QR codes, informed us that many people did not allow them to install the QR codes in their premises or refused to give the information that was required to be collected as part of the QR installation drive (interview with the proprietor of Datatronics, April 1, 2022). Even though the Datatronics employees were carrying a letter from MSCL, there were many instances where the residents did not believe the letter. This has resulted in many households not being covered through the QR codes.

38In section 4, we discussed the complexification of the decision-making process in relation to the codes component of the project. These complexities also led to partial coverage of QR codes. Datatronics installed only 90,000 codes, which does not cover all households. Moreover, the contract did not specify the methodology to be used in installing these codes. Datatronics, in turn, hired gig workers and private companies to install QR codes at random in all the wards under time constraints. These workers installed the codes in houses that were easily accessible to them, leaving out those that resisted or were simply inaccessible for other reasons. Hence, none of the wards or neighborhoods is fully covered by the system. The Smart City also lacks information on households where the codes are not installed. In the absence of comprehensive QR code coverage, the data are not only incomplete, but also useless for analyzing the overall system’s efficiency. That could be the reason why the Smart City is now not looking for comprehensive analysis of data and the scanning of two or three houses per lane is considered sufficient to claim that the whole street has been covered (interview with an engineer from the Smart City, February 1, 2023).

Note 2: The total number of properties in Mangaluru is 90,093.

Source: Mangaluru Smart City Door to Door Report from August 2021 to August 2022.

39This does not prevent most of the employees of the Smart City to argue that there is full coverage at the city level, indicating the perceptions that shape discourses on the ground. Similar statements regarding the impact of scanning claim that the uptake was initially slow but later picked up. However, the data shared by the Smart City with us contradict the claims made. They show that at its peak (in December 2021), the scanning did not even cover 2% of the properties where the QR codes were fixed (Figure 6). Since then, the scanning shows a downward trend with almost no scans done in August 2022. These numbers indicate how far the project is from its shared objectives. It is neither a pilot nor a test bed, but perhaps an ad-hoc component awaiting completion. However, the completion would require a lot of work on the ground: to engage with the daily SWM work and to even start looking at the data produced. Nevertheless, some employees of Smart City and the municipal corporation still believe that the QR code component would improve the quality of SWM services, while others like a municipal corporation engineer remark:

I... really... don’t know… I only joined last year... commissioner said it would be easier to track via this app... Basically every household is integrated by this code. Data on every household is then available. This is useful for micro-planning. It started with solid waste management, but it is just to gather more data... not for solving any problem… (March 29, 2022).

An inefficient grievance redressal system

40The other objective of the project was to streamline the grievance redressal system related to SWM. It was to be done through the OneTouch Mangaluru app. Discussing the rationale behind this app, the Managing Director of the Smart City told us:

When you want to “provide a world-class city” these kinds of digital solutions can help. We wanted a system wherein common people can access government officials directly and receive an immediate remedy to their problems. (March 31, 2022).

41However, when we tried to check how the grievance redressal system worked through the app, we found that the latter is not available on all mobile platforms. While there is an Android version, it is not available on iOS. Logging into the system is cumbersome and it is not easy to find how a complaint about SWM related issues could be filed. Moreover, at the backend, the grievance redressal system is not integrated with the municipal corporation’s system. An employee of Trinity, who compiles the complaints lodged through the app, prepares an Excel file and shares that with the MCC health inspector. There is no mechanism through which he would know what sort of problems could be escalated at what levels. This situation resonates with Datta’s (2023) assertion that analog recordkeeping still remains central to the digitalization of urban governance in the Global South. It dismantles the claims that the app would streamline the grievance redressal system and that people would receive immediate remedies to their problems. Moreover, it raises questions about whether the city requires a single-window system for grievance redressal.

42During our fieldwork we observed that outside the context of this app, Mangaluru’s residents pursue a diverse set of options to solve their SWM related complaints. These options include contacting their ward councilor, Antony Waste supervisors, health inspectors at MCC, or even the waste workers who come to collect the waste from the neighborhoods. These actors can be contacted through phone calls, SMS, emails, letters, and WhatsApp messages. People who do not know any of them can either call the MCC control room to file complaints or visit the corporation’s office, where an MCC staff member and an Antony Waste employee sit with their registers. All MCC health inspectors and Antony Waste supervisors are part of a WhatsApp group that is used to convey the complaints to the most appropriate person and get them resolved quickly. Residents also have the option to use the Swachhata-MoHUA app launched by the Indian government’s Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (The Hindu Businessline 2020). Each of these mechanisms have their own processes of grievance redressal. This pluralism is an essential aspect of the everyday city and its diverse milieu. The residents’ different preferences are a matter of local context, culture, and the relationship between the resident and the local government (Berenschot and Bagchi 2019, Harriss-White 2020).

43Even if one were to believe digitalization’s array of promises (order, modernity, and efficiency), it is unclear if cleaning the city of these informalities would make the system more efficient. Existing scholarship has argued the empowering nature of these informalities (Berenschot and Bagchi 2019). They embolden urban residents, particularly the marginalized, for whom the bureaucratic terrain is frequently difficult to navigate. In this project, we see that the image of the Smart City as the materialization of the future moral state, i.e., with more sophisticated, accountable, and transparent structures of governance, is not as easily achieved through digitalization (Datta 2019). The notion that technology can accelerate toward this future is defeated at the implementation level. What happens to the image of the clean city, in this context? It seems that the Smart City does not do better than the old system, but simply complicates the existing system by trying to oversimplify it.

7. Conclusion

44There is a growing concern toward the digitalization of urban service delivery due to its possible implications for a more predictive and algorithmic governance (Kitchin 2015), and for the citizen-state relationships (Sadowski 2021). In this paper, we sought to understand the ongoing digitalization of governance in Mangaluru through the lens of SWM. In tracing the origins of and the path taken by the project, this paper locates the “digital solution” introduced by Mangaluru Smart City within the larger background of the city’s existing SWM practices. The city’s recent reputation for its efficient SWM system, along with the push provided by policies such as the Swachh Bharat Mission and the Smart Cities Mission has propelled its desire to move toward a kind of city that is modern, smart, and clean. Digitalization appears as a key feature of this new city. This paper shows that these desired outcomes are far from being achieved. The study of the digitalization of SWM in Mangaluru, instead, leads us to make a few observations.

45First, it enables us to characterize the shifts that are at work with the arrival of a new type of private players, in particular the local system integrators and the technology vendors. The technology vendor becomes an indispensable technical expert who benefits from knowledge asymmetry and can design “solutions” that lock in municipal administrations. Their role in designing digital interventions in an already fragmented governance tends to dilute the already weak power of the local government further.

46Second, the specificity of SWM raises a set of questions regarding the introduction of digital projects for urban services where street-level bureaucrats are critical to delivery processes. SWM is an acute case because of its dependence on a large number of employees. We argue that contrary to very optimistic views on the potential of technologies, the very nature of this sector is not conducive to certain innovations, which a cost-benefit analysis would certainly further show. Much greater investment in training, monitoring, and improving working conditions would certainly have a greater impact than the introduction of measurement tools, especially when the latter are only partially implemented. Such an outcome could differ in other sectors (for instance, if one looks at the integration of payments for different modes of transport). This leads us to call for the development of situated analysis of digitalization, across sectors and cities, to go beyond normative postures. It would be important to expand work on other urban services to verify if these shifts are sector specific or also transposed to other sectors where digitalization is progressing rapidly.

47Third, the supposed promises of digitalization with regard to accountability are far from being fulfilled. What the Mangaluru case shows us is the opposite: a digital veneer that does not solve the problems faced by residents, who still prefer to resort to other means to make their voices heard. But beyond that, fears about the nature of the data collected, even within the municipal administrations, reinforce the mistrust that is already known to be a major feature of relations between citizens and the state in India. In this sense, forced digitalization does not seem to be going in the direction of improving the local social contract.

48This series of observations open up points for a final discussion. Digital interventions are frequently viewed in a binary light. They are either lauded as game-changers, or criticized as being completely vacuous projects—a sheer product of corporate marketing. We argue that these perspectives are neither accurate nor useful in examining the shifts created by digitalization. Smart City technologies have not completely substituted the old systems and the materiality of the urban fabric. Instead, the digital interventions highlight the room for improvement. Through processes of regular and informed consent, such interventions can be accommodated. Such a perspective allows us to see the possibilities held by digital interventions while being cautious about their harmful effects. In this light, we contend that while Smart Cities in India have not been game-changers, their effects cannot be completely dismissed. Our paper demonstrates a new way of looking at digital infrastructure that is not a zero-sum calculation. Such a middle ground allows us to examine the possibilities of understanding digital interventions as evolving aspects of cities as opposed to static components, where new systems do not completely replace old systems but create contradictions, revealing gaps for the local government to improve on.

49We understand the limitations of this study, as it was conducted while the digitalization project was still in progress. This prevented us from looking at the complete project. However, studying it in its implementation phase also enabled us to understand the functional problems such undertakings face, which may lead to bigger problems in future. This paper also builds a foundation for future research that could look into the overall impact of the project. Systematic studies of the impact of SWM digitization on citizens could provide extremely valuable insights into the implications of digitalization for urban governance. Studies on the effect of ICT interventions on coordination between various government actors, private parties, and citizens could tell us whether the efficiency of the SWM system lies in information and optimization, or more complex social behaviors.