Inhabiting the landfill

From the late 1960s, the municipality began to relocate Mumbai’s pavement and slum dwellers to Deonar allotting them plots of land: those who came from Umarkhadi called their settlement, near the gate of the dumping ground, Umarkhadi. Others who were sent from Bandra called theirs Bandra Plot. The settlers began to trawl through the grounds to sort and resell cloth scraps, paper and metal as a means of earning a livelihood.

As the decades passed, the city’s trash changed: cloth scraps shrank on the mountains, plastic — broken televisions, squashed bottles and plastic sheets —increased. These didn’t meld into the earth as food and cloth did, but only fed the growing mountains.

Deonar is one of Asia’s largest dumping grounds and is probably its oldest too. It reflects the dizzying growth and swelling desires of a city. The landfill currently holds between 13 million to 16 million tonnes of garbage, with at least 2000 Metric Tonnes (MT) added to it daily.

But the absence of a waste management system has begun to hurt the city, starting with the lives of the people living closest to the landfill. Some of the most common ailments to be found among the residents here include asthma, multiple drug resistant tuberculosis, cuts, bruises and eye disorders.

Several studies have been conducted over the years to assess the impact of the landfill on the city. A 2012 study showed that benzene, a carcinogenic, festered in the mountain air, many times greater than at any of the landfills the authors looked at elsewhere in the world. Medical studies from 2009 showed the haze around the mountain was thick with the carcinogenic chemical, formaldehyde. Most recently, a paper published in the Clinical Epidemiology and Global Health journal pointed out that people staying in the vicinity of dumping ground within the radius of a kilometre (“exposed group”) had more instances of respiratory illnesses, eye disorders and gastrointestinal problems than a group from a distant community living with similar socioeconomic conditions.

One hundred and twenty two years since it first came as the result of a plague, a new pandemic grips the city. The grounds now house the waste of a new disease: face masks, sanitizer bottles and latex gloves; more plastic and organic waste from hospitals and homes.

Around 2005, the civic body made a waste processing facility at Kanjurmarg, where more than 80% of the city’s waste is currently processed. Efforts to build such a waste-to-power plant for the Deonar landfill waste have been on for well over three decades, yet a plant is still to come up.