The website of Chennai Corporation has an option, Vehicle Monitoring, which is supposed to let anyone keep a track of garbage trucks and waste collected from all the zones of the civic body.

The facility had been devised so that all garbage trucks, fitted with GPS tracking systems, could be monitored online. The corporation's solid waste management and the vehicle maintenance departments were supposed to monitor the system.

But two years after the system was introduced as a pilot project, it has proved to be of little use like many of the civic body's other technology-driven initiatives. "It does not tell us anything worthwhile, except that a certain amount of garbage is being cleared from our zone. We do not know where the garbage is being collected from," said Raji Suresh, the secretary of an apartment residents' association in Mandaveli.

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