Delhi’s Mountain of Danger - Shame for civic bodies

As we enter New Delhi, it's a land of towering Five Star hotels, government institutions & residences. But, whenever we pass through the roads of the National capital, one can never miss a panoramic view of huge landfills & massive sight of more than 100 feet tall Garbage Mountains of the decaying trash having an acrid smell and obnoxious gases coming out of it.

''On September 1, 2017, two people died and five people were injured in East Delhi after a large part of the Ghazipur landfill — which should have been closed 15 years ago — collapsed in the afternoon of 2^nd September, sweeping several people on a road nearby into a canal. Heaps of garbage dropped into the Kondli canal running alongside the landfill, creating a giant wave of slushy water that hit the road next to the canal. It washed away four vehicles -an Accent car, a scooty and two bikes -which fell into a drain on the other side of the road.''

This was an extremely unfortunate incident. But looking at the statistics and the attitude of the civic bodies it seems that they were waiting for an incident like this to happen to take an imperative decision on taking an action on the policies of Waste Management.

According to statistics Ghazipur trash mountains are spread over 70 acres of land and the landfill contains no less than 12 million tons of waste. The landfill is currently assessed to be no less than 50 feet tall. It overshot its utmost of 15 feet in 2002, yet without an option site, the landfill keeps on working. In spite of the prohibition on the burning the waste, the colossal garbage mountains of New Delhi release toxic fumes, which keeps on lying for months. Many people living near these dumps suffer deadly diseases like tuberculosis, typhoid, dengue, malaria, encephalitis and etc. Many environmental specialists also analyzed and suggested that the small fires get ignited itself in the waste zone due to spontaneous combustion rate, which majorly occurs from the expulsion of methane gas from decomposition of unsegregated waste which was the main reason for the blast that occurred inside the Ghazipur landfill causing the avalanche.

In spite of all this, the government remained utterly negligent towards the situation. Even after the accident that happened in Ghazipur, instead of accepting the mistake and making up for it they remained apathetic as Delhi Government blamed the East Delhi Municipal Corporation and vice versa.

After this tragedy, it high time that the civic authorities start working on the policies pertinent to Waste Management in Delhi by adopting more scientific methods of waste disposal, segregation of waste, composting, recycling etc. Also we should not shy away from taking inputs from countries such as Sweden, Netherlands etc, which were successfully able to manage their waste.