Analysis | Delhi drowning in its own garbage: Can Kejriwal's MCD pull it out?

The Aam Aadmi Party won the recent Delhi MCD elections. The party had promised that if it takes over the civic body, it will make the "mountains" of trash disappear from the city in 5 years. Now that they have won, can Kejriwal do as promised? Or did he bite more than he could chew? Writes ETV Bharat's Nisar Dharma.

Hyderabad: Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal may have surmounted the MCD polls but he has to do something as incredible as 'Manjhi, the mountain man' to get rid of the massive mounds of garbage in the national capital. While Dashrath Manjhi took 22 years to carve a road through a mountain, Kejriwal has five to bring down three garbage cliffs in the national capital, one of them as high as the Qutub Minar.

After all, his party won the recent MCD polls on the promise to achieve what the BJP couldn't in 15 years of its rule in the corporation. Late last month, Kejriwal's deputy Manish Sisodia asked people to vote for the AAP in the municipal polls to clear the "garbage of the BJP".

He even promised that if the AAP wins the civic polls, it will make the "mountains" of trash disappear from the city in five years. Here we are. AAP has won and the five years have begun. Can Kejriwal do as promised? Or did he and his deputy bite more than they could chew?

Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal visiting Ghazipur landfill site in October where he launched a scathing attack on the BJP for the 'garbage mountain'.

Let's analyse the challenge ahead of them and see whether there are any practical chances of getting rid of the infamous 'trash towers' and solving the garbage problem of the national capital.

The challenge

Back in the 1980s, Delhi's streets and lanes were filled with household waste. The authorities were under pressure to find a space that could accommodate the city's daily trash. They finally settled on Ghazipur in East Delhi in 1984, the first of the three landfill sites that would torment Delhi a few decades later.

Over the next decade, the city expanded and people's consumption patterns changed radically. The use of single-use plastic and packaged material increased and with it changed the quantity and nature of garbage coming out of houses and business establishments.

People started to forget the age-old wisdom behind waste segregation, composting and recycling as they adopted the use-and-throw style. To get rid of the increased waste, the authorities chose a second site in Northwest Delhi's Bhalswa in 1994. Two years later, another such site became operational in South Delhi's Okhla.

Over the years, as the garbage piled on (the latest figures say Delhi generates 11,000 metric tonnes of waste every day), the landfill sites soon started to tower up. The one at Ghazipur is almost as high as Qutub Minar while Bhalswa reached an estimated height of 62 metres in 2019. In Okhla, the mound is 42 metres tall. All of them have long crossed the permissible height of 20 metres.

The exercise to dispose of the garbage from these landfill sites and clear the area began in 2008 but hardly anything substantial has been achieved. Ideally, the three sites should have been closed years ago when they exceeded their waste-carrying capacities. As per the official figures, the sites hold 3 crore metric tonnes of solid waste, the stench of which permeates the Delhi air making it even more polluted.

The threat

The national capital is struggling to breathe as the air quality index has touched alarming levels several times in the recent past. This forced the administration to bring in emergency measures such as banning the entry of diesel vehicles and stopping all non-essential construction work in the national capital.

Amid this, the "mountains" of garbage pose an additional and even graver threat to people, not just a few hundred thousand but around 25 million of them living in Delhi, the second most populated city in the world after Tokyo.

As per experts, the mounds of garbage have impacted the groundwater quality in the national capital. Rains lashing the mounds are turned into leachate, a thick black liquid, that slowly mixes and contaminates the groundwater. The leachate also flows through the storm drains to finally enter Yamuna, which is one of the most polluted water bodies in the country, if not the entire world.

According to a November 2021 research by Deepak Kumar of University of Hannover Germany, the average annual leachate percolation from the base of the Ghazipur site has been estimated as 24.36 million litres. As water facilities in the area are partially available by municipal agencies hence, nearby inhabitants depend upon groundwater to supplement daily water requirements.

Another study was conducted to find out the extent of contamination of the groundwater samples by chemical analysis. The major aim of the study was to find out the chemical and biological contamination of the nearby area of this landfill. It was clear that the quality of groundwater near the Ghazipur site deteriorated with high concentrations of pH, total dissolved salts, iron, Sulphur dioxide, nitrate, and bacteria.

These landfill sites accommodate all types of waste including municipal waste, bio-medical waste, construction debris, industrial waste, slaughterhouse waste, and even electronic waste.

Delhi’s per capita municipal solid waste generation is 700g per day, five times the national average. The average domestic hazardous waste generated in Delhi is 0.03±0.01kg per day per home and sources of this waste were majorly batteries, paint, CFL bulb, discarded syringes, broken mercury thermometer, and discarded medicines.

When these wastes are finally disposed of in the garbage "mountains" and interact with other solid waste, it leads to a great potential hazard to groundwater, those living nearby as well as the overall environment.

Not just leachate, the garbage is also a source of methane and other harmful gases. Now and then, Delhiites and especially those living around the mounds have to breathe through plumes of black smoke triggered by frequent fires on the garbage mounds. Cases of skin allergies, lung disorder, and even cancer have been attributed to the pollution emanating from these gigantic trash piles.

Anumita Rai Chowdhary, head of air quality monitoring at the Center for Science and Environment, believes that people living around the three landfill sites are most troubled by these garbage "mountains".

“Skin diseases are infectious diseases. If there are more such people in a particular area, then they can infect other populations in metro, bus and other crowded places. Garbage "mountains" and solid waste management are not the problem of any particular area of Delhi NCR but the problem of the entire population,” Chowdhary said.

The solution

Experts say that at least half of the solid waste dumped in the landfill sites can be used for compost or biogas production while 30% of it can be recycled. Only the remaining 20% should reach the sites. But what BJP in its 15 years rule in MCD has failed to achieve is proper segregation of waste at source.

Ideally, household wastes need to be segregated at source followed by recycling and composting. Segregation at source is one of the key highlights of Solid Waste Management Rules 2016 notified by the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change (MoEF&CC). These rules replaced the Municipal Solid Wastes (Management and Handling) Rules, 2000.

As per the new rules, waste needs to be segregated at source in order to channelise the process of recovery, reuse, and recycle. Waste generators, the rules say, should segregate waste into three streams- Biodegradables, Dry (Plastic, Paper, metal, Wood, etc.) and Domestic Hazardous waste (diapers, napkins, mosquito repellants, cleaning agents etc.) before handing it over to the collector.

Six years later, however, the fundamental reason behind the “poor state” of the city’s cleanliness has been the poor enforcement of SWM rules. The MCD as well as other government bodies responsible for keeping Delhi clean could not holistically implement segregation of waste at source. While BJP and AAP were involved in political blabber, the garbage kept on piling up.

The three civic bodies in Delhi – the south MCD, the north MCD and East Corporation ­– spent a whopping Rs 11,750 crores on sanitation and cleaning services between 2016-17 and 2020-21. Interestingly, there was no specific allocation for flattening the landfill sites in the budget even though sanitation formed the highest share of the total budget at 30 percent.

The solution has always been out there. Its ineffective, and, at times, zero implementation is what has turned Delhi into a choke pit. Segregation at source and decentralised waste treatment is not rocket science as the authorities have enough resources to implement the same strictly.

Making residents aware of how important waste segregation is and enforcing any and all penal actions against those flouting the SWM rules are imperative if AAP needs to bring any change on the ground. While managing the waste at source, the authorities should also expedite the process of flattening the landfill sites.

AAP’s National Executive In-Charge Durgesh Pathak says the party will learn from foreign countries and understand from them how to manage waste better and get rid of the mounds. Pathak should know that the solution has always been there. Instead of talking about them, it is high time his party with its control over MCD implements the same to see the results.