In 2019, BBMP's official complaint app Sahaaya had 11,785 complaints registered in five weeks, of which only six got resolved.

Six complaints out of nearly twelve thousand is a resolution rate of 0.05%.

One resident told reporters he'd filed 50 to 60 complaints over eighteen months, and when he asked a BBMP official about it, they admitted he had never opened the app.

Bangalore has the apps, helplines, budget, portals, everything. They spend hundreds of crores on waste management annually.

There are apps, portals, IVR menus, complaint tracking systems, escalation matrices, basically a full universe of civic infrastructure.

All of it just to produce a resolution rate of 0.05%.

Then, earlier this month, a product designer named Jyothish VM built a website over one weekend that logged over 500 civic complaints that month. 

Simply upload a photo, done in 30 seconds. It cost him ₹3,000 for the domain name.

The obvious takeaway is that a smart guy outsmarted a dumb system.

Let's believe the problem is just bad execution - hire better people, build a better app, add more budget.

But there’s more to the story.

There's a concept from medicine called iatrogenics. It means, literally, "caused by the healer".

When the treatment makes the patient sicker and the intervention produces more damage than the disease it was designed to cure.

Antifragile writer Nassim Nicholas Taleb said this problem (iatrogenics) happens in many fields.

It means that when people try to fix a complex system, they can end up causing bigger problems instead. 

In economics, Alan Greenspan tried to reduce small market ups and downs, but this helped create the conditions for the 2008 financial crash.

In foreign policy, military actions meant to solve problems can sometimes make the situation worse.

His main point was that when people interfere in complicated systems without fully understanding them, their solutions can backfire.

Taleb calls this naive interventionism, the belief that every problem needs an active fix from above.

More than 2,400 years ago, Hippocrates captured the same principle in medicine: first, do no harm.

In healthcare, this warning is well known.

Outside medicine, people often forget it. That is why Taleb brought the idea into economics, politics, and public policy.

Now apply this to Bengaluru’s garbage problem. 

“Why doesn’t the government fix it?”

NO

“What if the way the government is trying to fix it is part of the reason the problem continues?”

BBMP failed by building a system that trained 12 million residents to stop trying.

Every complaint that disappeared into Sahaaya without resolution taught someone that reporting is pointless.

Every IVR menu that consumed ten minutes of your time and produced nothing taught someone that civic participation costs time and delivers nothing.

Every phone number shared with a ward corporator who then called to harass the complainant taught someone that participation is dangerous.

The system designed to receive complaints became the reason people stopped complaining.

That's iatrogenics. The healer is causing the disease.

The intervention ended up producing the same public passivity it was supposed to solve.

India's Economic Survey 2024-25 found that only 8.25% of graduates work in roles matching their qualifications.

Over 50% of graduates end up in semi-skilled or elementary jobs.

The education system, designed to improve employability, produces graduates who are, in many cases, less employable than if they'd spent those years gaining practical experience.

The Good Samaritan Law was passed in 2016 to protect people who help at accident scenes.

The result: 59% of helpers still report being detained by police. So a law meant to make people feel safe helping others has often failed to provide real protection.

The pattern keeps repeating.

The government builds a platform that asks people to register, verify themselves, and share personal details.

Citizens give their time and trust, but the system does not respond. People learn that participation is costly and useless, so they stop engaging.

Then, low engagement is treated as proof that citizens do not care, and another new platform is launched.

Each cycle makes the next one harder. The damage is cumulative, and every failed interaction raises the threshold of what it would take to get someone to try again.

This is why Bangalore's garbage problem isn't a resource problem.

The city generates roughly 4,500 metric tonnes of garbage daily and has the budget to manage it.

The problem is that decades of iatrogenic interventions have systematically destroyed the feedback loop between citizens and the systems that serve them.

Jyothish didn't build a better version of Sahaaya. He built the opposite.

Sahaaya requires registration, OTP verification, category selection from 18 dropdowns, location pinning, and your phone number.

NammaKasa only requires a photo.

Taleb has a term for this approach: via negativa i.e. Improvement through subtraction rather than addition.

Instead of asking "what features should we add?", you ask "what harmful elements should we remove?"

NammaKasa removed login requirements, phone numbers, app downloads, and the long 18-category dropdown.

And sstripped away every layer of friction that BBMP had spent years and crores creating.

The result was immediate.

As the website saw thousands of visitors and over 500 complaints quickly.

People who hadn't reported a civic issue in years suddenly participated, because the barriers that had trained them not to were gone.

The ₹3,000 outperformed because his starting point was subtraction.

Every feature the government added to "improve" civic engagement was a feature that made engagement harder.

Once you see iatrogenics, you start seeing it in systems you trusted.

Corporate training programs that make employees worse at their jobs by replacing intuition with compliance checklists.

Parenting advice that makes parents more anxious and less effective by replacing instinct with optimization.

Health apps that make people less healthy by replacing the simplicity of eating real food with the complexity of tracking macros.

In complex systems, the people trying hardest to solve problems often make them worse.

Not out of bad intent, but because people naturally prefer adding over removing, building over simplifying, and constant action over stepping back.

Sometimes, less intervention works better.

Hippocrates understood this, Taleb formalized it, and a product designer in Bangalore proved it with ₹3,000 and a weekend.

The garbage pile outside my building in Delhi has been there for three weeks.

There is a municipal app I could use, but it requires registration, verification, and a 15-field complaint form.

The last time I used it, my complaint was marked "resolved" without anyone visiting. And it taught me not to try again.

That's iatrogenics at work. And knowing its name is the first step to refusing its training.

Hit reply and tell me: What system in your life is making the problem it was designed to solve worse?

I read every email.

Until next week,
Ritesh

P.S. You can see Bangalore's garbage map at nammakasa.vercel.app. ₹3,000 and the removal of everything that wasn't working. Sometimes the best fix is to stop fixing.