Kerala’s plan for a canal-cleaning AI robot is not innovation: it’s an expensive apology for official neglect, dressed up as 'Smart City' progress.
Published Oct 31, 2025 | 12:00 PM ⚊ Updated Oct 31, 2025 | 1:01 PM
Waterways, once part of Kerala’s natural drainage system, have become open sewers. (File picture of Amayizhanchan Thodu).
Synopsis: Kerala once led India in people’s movements, literacy, and decentralisation reforms. It still can. But a state that calls itself Malinya-muktha Nava Keralam must first prove it in the waterbodies of its capital. Real progress is not about “Smart Cities”; it’s about smart citizens and responsible governance.
The Thiruvananthapuram Municipal Corporation is about to install an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered robot to clean the Amayizhanchan Thodu, a canal that drains water from most parts of the city.
This is a pilot project. This robot will recognise garbage, scoop it out, and supposedly restore the waterways. Sounds smart? But it isn’t. It’s the latest display of how our governance mistakes are dressed up as technological triumphs.
Let’s get this straight. It is illegal to dump waste — solid or liquid — into any canal, drain, or waterbody. The Kerala Municipality Act, 1994, the Solid Waste Management Rules, 2016, and the Water (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act, 1974, all prohibit this dumping of waste.
Canals are meant to carry water, not garbage. Dumping waste is a crime. Failing to prevent it is also a crime. That failure sits squarely with the municipal corporation.
Amayizhanchan Thodu in Thiruvananthapuram.
So, when the Corporation plans to install a ₹50-lakh AI robot at the end of Amayizhanchan Thodu to “clean up” what it failed to stop, it’s not innovation: it’s an expensive apology, for inefficiency and negligence. It’s the same old end-of-pipe logic: allow pollution to happen and then glorify its cleanup. Do nothing to prevent it upstream, where the problem actually begins.
The money poured into these systems could have built genuine waste-management infrastructure or strengthened segregation and decentralised treatment.
Kerala likes to call itself a Zero-Waste State, with Malinya Mukta (waste-free) Keralam, Haritha Karma Sena, and the Suchitwa Mission’s vision of Malinya Muktha Nava Keralam — a new Kerala free of waste. These are undoubtedly exemplary policies.
One must agree that in many urban centres in Kerala, a positive change towards a garbage-free town or city is visible. But when setting up a costly permanent robot to clean canals full of garbage, it also means these celebrated policies have collapsed at the first real test. It’s a contradiction that exposes the gap between the promise and the practice of “Zero Waste.”
If canals in the capital city are choked with filth, if waste still flows into drains, and markets still dump garbage into canals, and if this needs a costly AI-powered Robot to remove them, then the policy has failed where it matters most – on the ground, in the everyday management of civic waste.
Studies by various agencies have repeatedly shown that canals and small waterbodies across Kerala have become dumping sites for solid and liquid waste — plastic, food refuse, slaughter waste, hotel effluents, and untreated greywater.
These waterways, once part of Kerala’s natural drainage system, have become open sewers. Each monsoon, that filth flows back into our homes as floods. And we keep calling it a “natural disaster.” It isn’t natural; it’s engineered neglect.
There is also a human cost. The tragic death of sanitation worker Joy in Thiruvananthapuram in July 2024 in the same canal should have been a turning point. He died inside a toxic drain, a victim of a collapsed system that still relies on human lives to clean up what governance failed to manage. If waste and sewage were properly managed, no one would have to enter a canal or drain to die. The AI canal project claims to prevent such risks.
But that’s a delusion — we’re not solving the problem upstream. We’re just mechanising the postmortem. Technology is being used not to correct governance but to hide its decay.
Let’s also remember that canals are not waste drains. They are watercourses — part of Kerala’s hydrological network, its arteries of life. They recharge groundwater, carry rainwater to rivers and backwaters, and support biodiversity. Dumping garbage and sewage into them is not just illegal, it’s suicidal.
By turning our water infrastructure into waste infrastructure, we’ve guaranteed both floods and contamination. And all this under the banner of the Smart City. But a city isn’t smart because it has cameras, dashboards, or robots.
It is smart when its citizens don’t dump waste and when its administration enforces the law. It is smart when every household segregates, and every local body ensures timely collection, recycling, and treatment. Real smartness lies in civic behaviour and honest governance, not in flashy machines installed at the tail-end of our failures.
Let’s be honest. Even this AI robot will fail. Because we have a habit of not maintaining what we inaugurate. Like so many projects before, this will be another ceremonial showpiece, installed with fanfare and forgotten after the headlines fade. The garbage will continue to come, the robot will break down, and the same canal will again stink of our hypocrisy.
If we truly want smart cities, let’s start with smart governance — one that enforces waste segregation at source, punishes illegal dumping, and treats every canal as a living waterway, not a drain.
Above all, let’s stop pretending that technology can substitute for governance. AI robots can clean canals, but they cannot clean the apathy, corruption, and negligence that create the filth in the first place. AI can wait until we’ve learned the basics of being human.
Kerala once led India in people’s movements, literacy, and decentralisation reforms. It still can. But a state that calls itself Malinya-muktha Nava Keralam must first prove it in the waterbodies of its capital. Real progress is not about “Smart Cities”; it’s about smart citizens and responsible governance.
Until we stop treating technology as an alibi for failed governance, even the smartest AI will just be another shiny machine floating in our filth.
(The writer is a Kerala-based engineer, environmentalist, and observer on development and policy related to the environment, agriculture, and climate. Views are personal. Edited by Majnu Babu).
