Mountains Of Garbage Overwhelm New Delhi
GHAZIPUR, India — Huddled in a stinky room near India’s capital, Rammurti fumed over the 17- story-high mountain of trash within a kilometer of her home. The 43-year- old mother, who goes by one name, had watched the garbage in Ghazipur pile higher over the years. It wafted particles that i nfected neighbors with tuberculosis and dengue fever, singed t rees and t urned ground water yellow.
But nothing had prepared her for one afternoon last September when a tower of trash broke away during monsoon rains. It crashed into a nearby canal, which created a surge of sewage that flung motorcyclists into another dirty canal. Two people died. One of them was Rammurti’s son, 19-year- old Abhishek Gautam. “The dump killed my son,” she said.
In metropolitan Delhi, which includes the capital New Delhi, about 36.3 billion kilos of trash have accumulated at four official dumping sites, in an area already besieged by polluted air and toxic water.
The dumps have become some of the largest, least regulated and most hazardous in the world, said Ranjith Annepu, a co-founder of be Waste Wise, a nonprofit group.
Responding to the problem, the Indian government this month vowed to eliminate single- use plastic by 2022. “I reiterate our commitment to sustainable development,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi said.
But power in Delhi is shared by the local and national governments, which are controlled by different parties, leading to gridlock.
Something as simple as installing trash cans around Delhi has not been done, partly because many residents are used to flinging trash onto the ground. Refuse piles up.
In the last two decades, Delhi’s population has risen to about 19 million from about 12 million and infrastructure and government services have not kept pace. During roughly the same period, the amount of waste ferried to the dumps has grown from 3.6 million kilos to at least nine million kilos daily. About half is converted to energy or composted. The rest festers, according to P. K. Khandelwal, the chief engineer of the East Delhi Municipal Corporation, a local government body.
The Supreme Court said earlier this year that air traffic control at Delhi’s airport eventually would have to steer planes around the dumps. And a separate court warned officials that they could be charged if residents die from diseases such as dengue fever, which is spread by mosquitoes breeding in dirty water.
Will to find a solution is weakened because of the hundreds of thousands of ragpickers in the area. “There is absolutely no painless way to fix this waste problem,” said Ashutosh Dikshit, head of United Residents Joint Action, a Delhi group advocating for better services. “Politicians are not willing to make even one resident unhappy because then that resident will vote for the other party.”
Collecting all of the waste in Delhi and converting the dumps into sanitary landfills would cost about $75 million, Mr. Annepu estimated.
At the Ghazipur dump, skin infections, asthma attacks and heart arrhythmias are common. Some in the area questioned why the dump continued to grow despite government promises to shut it down after last year’s fatalities. “We are fourthclass citizens,” said Mohammed Ismail, 66, a business owner. “Nobody listens to us. We die like insects.”
On a recent day, trucks rumbled to the top of the garbage pile. Down below, Faiyaz Khan, the owner of a dairy plot, said this land was once dense forest, perfect for his buffalo.
“The height of the dump keeps increasing and my health keeps decreasing,” Mr. Khan said. “We are uneducated people. We do not understand the law, but we do know that this dump is illegal. What do I do? Shall I smash my head into a wall? How long can I live here?”