From Missed Duties to Machine Accuracy: How Nagpur Is Using Facial Recognition to Clean Up Sanitation Woes

• Chinmay
• May 13, 2025
• India, Internet of Things, News
• AI in government, facial recognition attendance, Indian smart city solutions, IoT in public services, low-cost civic tech, mobile-based attendance, nagpur municipal corporation IoT, real-time worker tracking India, sanitation accountability, smart sanitation system India
• 0 Comments

For years, sanitation has been Nagpur’s dirty secret—missed duties, overflowing bins, clogged drains, and a system too weak to hold anyone accountable. But that might just be changing.

The Nagpur Municipal Corporation (NMC) has quietly rolled out a facial recognition-based attendance system—and it’s already turning heads in the Dharampeth zone.

What’s Different This Time?

Previous attempts to monitor sanitation workers using smartwatches failed miserably. Why? Devices were passed around, attendance was faked, and daily wage replacements filled in off the books.

Now, NMC has gone back to the drawing board.

This time, it’s face first, work next. Workers have to physically show up at designated points and mark attendance using a mobile app with live facial recognition. The system matches the live image to a pre-registered database—cutting out proxies and loopholes.

Accountability in Real-Time

The new attendance app is doing more than just clocking workers in and out. It’s being seen as the “third eye” of the civic body—a way to visibly track ground-level work in real time.

During the trial (April 15 to May 15), nearly 500 workers are being tracked this way across the Dharampeth zone. If the results are promising, NMC plans to roll this out to all 10 zones.

Bigger Implication: From Attendance to Action

Sanitation is not just about presence—it’s about performance.

By integrating this system with Nagpur’s centralized grievance redressal platform, officials hope to reduce response times to citizen complaints about garbage, sweeping, and cleanliness.

For a city plagued with 50% staff vacancies and rising public anger, this tech-led accountability could be the turning point.

IoTAdda Takeaway:

This isn’t just about facial recognition. It’s about how IoT + AI + Data Integration is solving everyday, deeply human problems.

Low-cost mobile devices, live image verification, zone-based tracking, and citizen feedback loops—all stitched together into one outcome-driven system.

This is exactly the kind of simple, powerful tech adoption that India’s cities need—low-risk, quick results, real visibility.

Want to do something similar in your city or company?

• Shalaka Connected Devices builds custom IoT systems for real-time field force tracking.
• Think Binary can help you or your team understand the tech, data, and impact behind such projects.
• IoTAdda keeps you informed on how India is using technology to solve real problems—not someday, but today.