With all three landfills —South Delhi’s Okhla, East Delhi’s Ghazipur and North Delhi’s Bhalaswa — overflowing with garbage, the national Capital is sinking in its own filth. The crisis is growing worse as the civic bodies have failed to add any new infrastructure and are still struggling to identify new landfills.
Nearly 10,000 metric tonnes garbage is generated in Delhi daily. It is expected to go up by 25,000 metric tonnes by 2021. Where will all waste be dumpedIJ Can the recently launched Swachchh Delhi Mobile App be a solution to city’s garbage woesIJ Will this app be able to able to rescue Delhiites from the health hazards due to mounting heaps of garbageIJ
Besides, several metric tonnes of unattended garbage are lying in various nooks and corners but the agencies, which have been crying for resources (mainly fund crunch), are yet to set aside their differences to solve the stink.
About 49 per cent of the total population of Delhi lives in slum areas, unauthorised colonies and about 860 JJ Clusters with 4,20,000 jhuggies. A sizeable population therefore lives in unplanned areas having no proper system of collection, transportation and disposal of solid wastes.
As a rough estimate, only about 25 per cent of the population lives in planned development areas. There is also a huge floating population visiting the Capital in connection with business activities with Delhi being a major distribution centre of retail business in North India. The massive industrial growth in areas like Bawana and Narela is one of the major factors for rising heaps of garbage.
The authorities are unable to chalk out a strategy to deal with the sanitation hazard. The three municipal corporations, Public Works Department (PWD) and several others agencies — including NDMC, DDA and Jal Board, which ensure civic services especially sanitation activities — have failed measurably to address the garbage menace.
Of the three existing landfill sites, the Ghazipur landfill site is the oldest that came up in 1984. This caters to the waste generated in East and North East Delhi, Old Delhi, Paharganj zone and the entire New Delhi areas.
Bhalaswa landfill caters to the North, North West, Central and West Delhi areas while the Okhla landfill receives municipal waste from areas in South, South East and South West Delhi.
South MCD generates 3,000 metric tonnes of solid waste, North 2,800 metric tonnes and East 2,200 metric tonnes of waste. According to the Delhi Master Plan 2021, the city requires 1,500 acres of land for landfill sites. As per the sources in municipal corporations, at least 600 acres of land is required for a new landfill site.
Few weeks ago, Union Urban Development Minister M Venkaiah Naidu and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal along with the three MCDs launched the “Swachchh Delhi Abhiyan” for a common cause to make a clean Delhi. During the launch, the leaders went on to make tall claims to solve the deluge of complaints by the citizens on the garbage lying in and around the city. Their claim to remove all the garbage in 15 days ended in lack of coordination between the agencies. Poor monitoring of garbage lifting by private agencies, unavailability of landfills and excessive delay in completing solid waste management plants have worsened the situation.
Though the Delhi High Court had asked DDA to hand over the land at Sultanpur Dabas Village and Mandi village to North and South MCDs and EDMC has identified a land at Sonia Vihar for dumping garbage, it is still uncertain when the possession of these sites will be carried out.
Not only this, waste management plants conceived by municipal corporations couldn’t yield results. While the operational waste-based energy plant at Okhla is unable to consume the quantity of garbate dumped at the site daily, the similar plants at Narela and Ghazipur are lying idle. The proposed energy plant at Ghazipur once functional will consume about 1,300 metric tonnes of waste daily; whereas over 2,000 metric tonnes of garbage is dumped at the site every day. The SDMC has
proposed a couple of waste management plants at Bakkarwala and Dwarka but they would require a long time to be completed.
Nearly eight years ago, erstwhile MCD had outsourced the sanitation work to private agencies for better waste management but in vain. Currently, nine of the 12 administrative zones have the door-to-door garbage lifting facility in place but still the civic bodies fail to maintain zero-garbage timings at its dhalaos or the local garbage dumping sites. The three corporations spend nearly `200 crore on private agencies for garbage collection but poor monitoring has not only resulted in monetary loss to the civic agencies.