End to garbage hills a distant dream
ON AVERAGE, 5,315 TONNES OF GARBAGE HAS BEEN CLEARED EVERY DAY IN THE PAST 34 MONTHS
Delhi is sitting on 27.6 million tonnes of waste across three landfills, a marginal decline from the 28 million 34 months ago, when it embarked on an ambitious Rs 250 crore programme to clear the landfills -- a statistic that raises questions about the Municipal Corporation of Delhi’s (MCD) ability to complete the task in the next 16 months, the latest deadline set by new lieutenant governor (LG) VK Saxena.
On average, 5,315 tonnes of garbage has been cleared every day in the past 34 months (1.94 million tonnes a year; the number is based on the average rate of work).
Accounting for the net addition (4,931 tonnes of garbage is added every day to the landfills, or 1.8 million tonnes a year), it would take 197 years to clear them fully.
In total, some 5.5 million tonnes of legacy waste has been cleared from three landfills -an erroneous term for the dumps at Okhla, Bhalswa and Ghazipur, because they have become garbage mountains -in the 34-month period, but 5.1 million tonnes of new waste has been added.
If the aim is to clear the mountain of “legacy waste” alone, ignoring the mountain of new waste, it would still take 14 years.
Meanwhile, the cost of the project has now soared to Rs 1,864 crore, according to an official estimate submitted by the MCD to the Union ministry of housing and urban affairs.
A senior MCD official said that there are several variables, and processing levels go down during the three monsoon months when garbage gets wet and the fresh waste dumping at Ghazipur was double during the first six months of this year when its waste to energy plant was shut for maintenance repair work.
According to estimates submitted to the Centre, the largest of the three sites, East Delhi’s
Ghazipur, which holds more waste than the other two combined, has seen only 8% progress -- and that too when only legacy waste is taken into account.
The first quarterly monitoring report by Delhi Pollution Control Committee states that Ghazipur, which had 14 million tonnes of accumulated waste in July, 2019, landfill has 15 million tonnes on March 31 this year.
The MCD said that in order to tackle fresh waste dumping, the corporation is seeking to expand the capacity of waste to energy plants.
“One waste to energy plant at Tehkhand with 2000 TPD ( tonnes per day) capacity is likely to be commissioned by September 2022. We are also enhancing the capacity of existing plant at Okhla by 1,000 TPD for which the process has been started . And bids have been invited for a new plant at Narela Bawana which will have a capacity of 3,000 TPD. These projects will help in stopping fresh waste from reaching the landfill site and greatly enhance the net waste removal rate,” an MCD spokesperson said.
Despite repeated attempts, the LG office did not comment on the matter.
The original order issued by the National Green Tribunal in July 2019 stated that legacy waste dumps are to be “cleared within one year but substantial progress must be made and demonstrated within six months”, but there have been multiple revisions and extensions of these deadlines.