Centre, Delhi agencies to huddle next week, talk flattening landfills

NEW DELHI: Over a week after a massive fire broke out at Ghazipur landfill and continued for almost three days before it was doused, the Central government has called a meeting of the commissioners of the three municipal bodies in Delhi and other government agencies to ensure time-bound remediation of the three landfills in Delhi.

A senior East MCD official said that the meeting, hosted by the Ministry of Housing and Urban affair, will be held on Monday and will also be attended by officials from Delhi Development Authority, Central Pollution Control Board, National Highways Authority of India, and Delhi government’s urban development department and environment ministry. “The main agenda of the meeting is early and time-bound remediation of the three landfill sites -Ghazipur, Okhla and Bhalswa -along with solutions to various hurdles in the project,” the official said requesting anonymity. The meeting was originally scheduled on Friday but was later postponed to Monday.

“Our first priority in the Monday meeting will be to highlight the need for allocation of a new dumping site to prevent fresh garbage dumping in Ghazipur and space for storing inert material. Funds and space will be needed to carry out this task,” said a senior EDMC official.

The biggest of Delhi’s landfills, the Ghazipur site is considered to be the tallest garbage mound in the country. It is estimated to hold over 14 million tonnes of legacy waste, accumulated over 38 years.

A senior EDMC official overseeing the bio-mining operation at Ghazipur said that 960,000 tonnes of legacy waste has already been removed from the landfill since September 2019, at a daily average of 2,000 tonnes a day, but noted that the corporations continue to dump around 2,200 tonnes of fresh garbage daily.

While launching the second phase of the government’s flagship Swachh Bharat Mission (Urban) on January 10 this year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi emphasised on the importance of wiping out the “mountains of garbage” from cities. “...there is one such mountain of garbage in Delhi too. It has been sitting here for years and waiting to be removed,” he said, in an apparent reference to the Ghazipur landfill.