For days starting Jan 28, a massive fire swept through Mumbai’s Deonar dump, a 90-year-old landfill that should have long been shut. It’s a similar story across India’s metros — of poor urban waste management leading to mounds of refuse, some as tall as five-storey buildings.
Mumbai
An ageing mound bears the brunt
Daily Waste: 9,600 Tonnes
No. of landfills: 3 – Deonar, Mulund and Kanjurmarg
Agency responsible: The Shiv Sena-held Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation
The Deonar dumping ground, which was ablaze for days starting January 28, has been in operation since 1927. It will soon be 90 years old, a mostly unheard of age for landfills. In parts of Deonar, garbage heaps stand 15 metres high, as tall as a five- or six-storey building. It is sprawled across 132 hectares in a densely populated eastern suburb of the city, with slums on its fringes as well as plush homes less than a couple of kilometres away.
The Mulund landfill, which the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has promised to consider closing down — though nearly 2,600 tonnes get dumped here daily — has been functional since 1968. It’s barely 25 hectares and way past its use-by date.
Kanjurmarg, operational since 2003, is spread over 141 hectares and is the only one of Mumbai’s three dumps where mountains of garbage do not stand 10 metres tall. (Read more)
Life in Deonar: ‘Now we know how dangerous it is here’
The fire has sharpened everybody’s anger and fears, but poor health conditions are a year-long hazard for those living around Mumbai’s largest, and oldest, dumping ground. On the 100-odd plots cluttering the periphery of the dumping ground, each with 200 shanties, about one lakh people live in close proximity to the dump and breathe the toxic air. The dusty streets have mostly naked feet walking on them, including kids who play in the garbage after hoisting themselves over broken brick walls to get into the dump. (Read more)
Delhi
50 feet tall and growing, Ghazipur yard operates well beyond deadline
Ghazipur meets none of the scientific requirements for a landfill, say experts. (Express Photo by Oinam Anand)
Daily Waste: 9,000 Metric Tonnes
No. of landfills: 3 — Ghazipur, Okhla, Bhalswa
Agencies responsible: The three city corporations — Ghazipur by the East Delhi Municipal Corporation, Okhla by the south corporation and Bhalswa by the north corporation
The Ghazipur landfill in east Delhi, the oldest functional landfill in the city, was started in 1984. Spread across 70 acres, the landfill contains at least 12 million tonnes of waste. The landfill is now estimated to be at least 50 feet tall. It overshot its limit of 15 feet in 2002, but in the absence of an alternative site, the landfill continues to function.
“We used to call it a multi-storey building earlier, but how long do you keep counting? Five, 10, 15 storeys… now it is just too high,” says a computer operator at the site employed by the East Delhi Municipal Corporation (EDMC).
An EDMC notice at the entrance of a lane leading to the mound apologies to residents for the landfill continuing to operate beyond the expiry date. The notice also states that the landfill gets 3,000-3,500 metric tonnes (MT) of waste daily. It also gets sewage waste and construction rubble from east Delhi. Municipal workers at the site say at least 600-650 trucks go up the mound every day. Around 200 metres from here is the Ghazipur slum, home to about 1,500 families of ragpickers. (Read more)
Bengaluru
No landfills, 10 processing units
The Gundlahalli unit handling 1,000 tonnes of waste a day. People in nearby localities have complained of “rash” driving of vehicles that bring in garbage. (Express Photo)
Daily Waste: 3,500 Tonnes
No. of landfills: None since 2013.
Agency responsible: Seven of these processing units are run by the BBMP and three work under the PPP model. The BBMP plans to start more processing units in and around the city. The BBMP has private contractors who collect garbage from localities in the city and take them to these units. Before the waste reaches the processing units, it is segregated into wet, dry and hazardous waste.
According to Subhod Yadav, Special Commissioner for Solid Waste Management (SWM) in Bengaluru, Terrafarma in Gundlahalli near Doddaballapur (in Bengaluru Rural district, not in the limits of corporation) is the biggest waste processing unit, which does both composting and biomethanisation (where the waste is decomposed with microorganisms). (Read more)
Kolkata
At only functional dump, few safety steps
Daily Waste: 4,000 Metric Tonnes
No. of landfills: 2. One at Dhapa on the eastern fringes of the city and the other at Garden Reach in the west.
Agencies responsible: City’s waste is managed jointly by the Solid Waste Management (SWM) department of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) and private contractors.
The Dhapa landfill, which has been functioning since the 1980s, is spread across 50 hectares — Garden Reach is much smaller at 8 hectares. The landfill has a functional compost plant that can process 500 metric tonnes of waste a day.
At Dhapa, none of the workers wears gas masks or gloves. (Express Photo by Subham Dutta)
Though Debabrata Majumdar, member, Mayor in Council MMIC (conservancy), who is incharge of the landfills, claimed the Dhapa dump followed all safety norms and that “ground workers are equipped with gloves to avoid direct contact with solid waste and masks to avoid inhaling of harmful gases”, the reality at the site is very different. (Read more)
Chennai
As trash grows, so do protests
Daily Waste: 9,600 Tonnes
No. of landfills: 3 — two major ones, Perungudi south of Chennai and Kodungaiyur in the north, and a 20-acre site that recently opened at Tiruvottiyur in the north. They are all in the suburbs.
Agency responsible: The Chennai corporation handles 12 of the 15 zones in the municipal limits, employing 20,000 workers and 1,045 lorries to do the waste handling — collecting from the roadside bins and transporting them to the landfills. The remaining three zones have been handed out to a Hyderabad-based contractor, Ramki Enviro Limited, who has 55 vehicles and around 3,000 employees for the job. The corporation pays the contractor Rs 1,692 per tonne of waste, which includes the expenses for transportation to the landfills. The corporation manages the landfills.
Both Perungudi (228 acres) and Kodungaiyur (270 acres) are roughly as tall as a two-storey building. Every day, trucks bring in the city’s unsegregated refuse —construction rubble, plastic, rotting food — and make their way up the winding trail on the mountain of garbage.
The corporation claims that the landfill sites have the mandatory security set-up in place — compound walls, CCTV cameras, fire-fighting equipment and water tanks, and regularisation of ragpickers. At least 900 ragpickers work at these landfills and all of them have ID cards. (Read more)
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