Deonar: How not to scale a mountain
The court, the civic body, and resident-litigants have variously attempted to cut the height of the garbage mountains even as Mumbai stares at an ecological catastrophe
MUMBAI : Hamid Pathan was 50 when he moved to live in a lane along the boundary wall of the Deonar dumping grounds in 2001. Drawn by the prospect of finally owning a home in the city, Pathan didn’t think much about the garbage mountains that rose behind his house. He had heard that a waste processing plant was coming up that would soon shrink the mountains. “Isse yahaan ki hawa saaf ho jayegi [This will clean up the air here],” he thought.
While he made shoes, Pathan’s wife Tehrunissa joined their neighbours in trawling through the garbage hills, and collecting bottles and cloth scraps that fell out of garbage trucks arriving from the city. The foraged items would be sold to traders for money. She continued to do so even after she developed asthma. In 2011, at age 40, Tehrunissa died of an asthma attack. “The air here is deadly,” Pathan said, convinced that the noxious air from the landfill is responsible for his wife’s untimely demise.
In 1996, residents of Shanti Park Sorrento society, a group of middle class residential buildings located near the dumping grounds, filed a case in the Bombay high court (HC) stating that the landfill fires that were lit at night – allegedly by the waste-pickers – were causing grave health concerns, including asthma, among the residents. They pleaded that the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) manage the landfill better: a water tanker and fire engine should be on standby, a helpline should come up for registering fire-related complaints, the police should patrol regularly, and the area should be better lit, among other things.
The court passed orders and the grounds did indeed become better organized (the civic body began to layer mud with the trash to stabilise the mountains and prevent landslides), but the garbage kept on coming. Then, in 2008, Dr Sandeep Rane, a local resident, filed a contempt petition that the civic body had not complied with the earlier orders passed by the court in this case. Galvanised into action, the BMC entered into a contract with a private firm — Tatva Global Environment Limited, a subsidiary of the fertilizer company UPL Ltd — to build a 2,000 Tonnes Per Day (TPD) capacity waste processing plant that would make 400 TPD compost.
But clearing even part of the more than 13 million Metric Tonnes (MT) of garbage that filled the grounds, proved too hard. The plant did not come up at Deonar but the city’s garbage trucks kept arriving, and the fires kept burning.
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