Mountains of garbage engulf India’s capital
Sometimes deadly trash heaps are towering testaments to country’s growing waste crisis
Huddled in a stinky, airless room near the center of India’s capital, Rammurti fumed over the 17-storyhigh mountain of trash half a mile from her home.
The 43-year-old mother, who goes by one name, had watched the garbage in her village of Ghazipur pile higher and higher over the years. It wafted a sickening cocktail of airborne particles that infected her neighbors with tuberculosis and dengue fever, singed trees and turned the ground water a filmy yellow.
But nothing had prepared her for one afternoon in September when a tower of trash broke away from the mass during monsoon rains. It crashed into a nearby canal, which created a surge of sewage that flung motorcyclists into another canal also filled with dirty water.
By the time police arrived, two people were dead. One of them was Rammurti’s youngest son, 19-year-old Abhishek Gautam. “The dump killed my son,” she said. In the metropolitan area of Delhi, which includes the capital New Delhi, trash heaps are towering monuments to India’s growing waste crisis. About 80 billion pounds of trash have accumulated at four official dumping sites, on the fringes of a capital already besieged by polluted air and toxic water, according to the supervisors of the dumps.
The dumps in Delhi and cities such as Mumbai and Kolkata have become some of the largest, least regulated and most hazardous in the world, said Ranjith Annepu, cofounder of be Waste Wise, a nonprofit organization that aims to address waste management problems. “If this continues to happen, the city will drown in its waste,” said Swati Singh Sambyal, a program manager at the Center for Science and Environment in New Delhi.
Responding to the problem, the Indian government last week vowed to eliminate singleuse plastic by 2022.
“I reiterate our commitment to sustainable development,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi told a recent conference for World Environment Day.
But the government has been slow to take action to protect the environment. Politicians don’t want to risk losing votes by making tough decisions that could be unpopular.
Power in Delhi is shared by the local and national governments, which are controlled by different political parties, leading to bureaucratic gridlock. Even when rules are introduced, enforcement is weak and offenders can often pay a bribe to avoid punishment.
Something as simple as installing trash cans around Delhi has not been done, partly because garbage collection is not guaranteed and many residents are used to simply flinging trash onto the ground. “You don’t know whether the public will even use them,” Annepu said. Driving into Delhi, virtually no trash cans are visible. Refuse piles up in slums, next to government offices and outside luxury condominiums. Shantytowns without sewage systems have mushroomed all over — next to railroad tracks and public parks and behind high-end shopping centers.
In the last two decades, Delhi’s population has quickly 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 accumulated rapidly, growing from 8 million pounds to at least 20 million daily. About half the daily haul is converted to energy or composted. The rest sits and festers, according to P.K. Khandelwal, chief engineer of the East Delhi Municipal Corp., a local government body.
The problem with waste buildup has become so severe that the Supreme Court said earlier this year that air traffic control at Delhi’s international airport eventually would have to steer planes around the dumps because they are so high. The court also instructed lawmakers to find ways to eliminate the piles of garbage.
And a separate court has warned government officials responsible for health projects that they could be charged with homicide if residents continue to die from diseases such as dengue fever, which is spread by mosquitoes breeding in dirty water. There are some signs of hope. One of the four dumps in Delhi, which is operated by the government and a private company, has reduced its garbage heap by turning some trash into mulch.
The governing party, led by Modi, has taken steps to clean up the country with its Clean India Mission, started in 2014. And waste management rules introduced in 2016 fine people who do not separate their trash at home for recycling.
But Khandelwal said the government had difficulty finding land for new dumps and dealing with local protesters who oppose waste sites in their backyards.