.For decades, the Bhalswa landfill has been one of Delhi’s most visible contradictions — a hulking, smouldering presence on the city’s northern edge that some officials call a “legacy” problem and others call a public-health emergency. This year, the clean-up rhetoric has reached a newpitch.
Last week, Union Urban Development Minister Manohar Lal Khattar said he will adopt the landfill and aims to clear the decades-old waste moundwithin a year. “I have seen Bhalswa for the last 15 years while travelling from Karnal to Delhi,” Khattar said. “I have resolved that I will take all agencies along and ensure it is cleared in one year.”
He added officials met last week to review and resolve logistical and administrative hurdles with Delhi authorities. Khattar acknowledged previous deadlines failed because of heavy rains, local protests and poor coordination. The renewed strategy, he said, will introduce specific timelines, measurable targets and firm accountability among agencies to ensure the ambitious cleanup is completed on schedule within the next year. This is not the first time such a promise has been made.
In March, Delhi Environment Minister Manjinder Singh Sirsa said that the landfill will be cleared by March 2026, and 35% has already been removed. “By December 2025,the landfill will be reduced to a point that it will no longer be visible from a distance,” he added. Chief Minister Rekha Gupta and L-G V K Saxena also launched a bamboo plantation drive at Bhalswa. “In a year, this place will be completely transformed into a green land. Our mission is to clean and beautify Delhi, and with a double-engine government, we will achieve this goal at double speed,” the CM said.
Municipal authorities are also conducting a final phase of biomining that officials say will remove some 40 lakh metric tonnes (4 million tonnes) of accumulated waste by the end of 2026, while the civic body looks for alternative processing sites so fresh garbage is not added to the pile.
Yet the story of Bhalswa is as much about recurrent deadlines and interrupted work as it is about machines and trenches. For thousands who live, work and breathe in the landfill’s shadow, announcements are only useful if they translate into steady, visible change.
A mountain built over time
Bhalswa’s recorded life as a municipal dump began in the mid-1990s, when the site — roughly 70 acres on Delhi’s north-west fringe — was commissioned to receive the capital’s municipal solid waste. Over the years, the site ceased being a managed sanitary landfill and became a de facto mountain of mixed waste: household refuse, construction debris, bulk dumping, and the detritus of a city that produces more than 11,000 tonnes of solid waste a day.
“We were told this was only temporary. Thirty years later, it has become a permanent nightmare,” said Ramesh Kumar, a resident of Bhalswa Dairy Colony.
By the late 2010s, Bhalswa’s height had been repeatedly measured in double digits of metres — reports put it at more than 60 metres in some surveys — and the volume of “legacy” waste accumulated over decades ran into millions of tonnes.
The problem, in bureaucratic terms, is straightforward: the site was declared exhausted long ago, but fresh waste continued to arrive.
That accumulation made Bhalswa a symbol of an institutional failure, not only to dispose of garbage but to prevent dumping where it harms the environment and human health. The National Green Tribunal (NGT), which began to take an interest in Delhi’s three major dumpsites in 2019, ordered bio-remediation and biomining of legacy waste at Bhalswa, Ghazipur and Okhla; biomining, the mechanical and biological excavation and sorting of old waste to recover inert material and combustible fractions while stabilising organic matter, became the principal technical remedy. “Biomining is happening, but at this speed, it will take another decade,” admitted a senior official of Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD).
But biomining was never a one-off operation to be completed quickly: it required machinery (trommel screens, windrow turners), trained contractors, land for processing separated fractions and a system to prevent fresh waste from undoing the gains. The mismatch between the scale of the pile and the available processing and disposal capacity has been the root cause of repeated delays.
Slow grind of biomining
Since 2019, Bhalswa’s tidy calendars have been repeatedly disrupted. The NGT’s 2019 direction set a legal expectation that legacy waste be addressed promptly. In practice, the work has staggered through phases, tenders and institutional changes.
Local and national politicians have set their own timelines, sometimes in public ceremonies. Earlier this year, Delhi’s environment minister pledged a flattening of Bhalswa by March 2026, and officials have routinely announced reclaimed acreage and reductions in mound height. But those commitments have often collided with the realities of procurement delays, monsoon rains, equipment breakdowns and, crucially, the continued dumping of fresh garbage at sites that were supposed to be off-limits. The effect is predictable: progress is made, then replenished by new inflows and the net decline in the mountain is smaller than the headline numbers suggest. On paper, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi has stepped up operations.
Biomining work, which began in earnest after the NGT order, has progressed in phases and the civic body has increased capacity by adding trommel machines and rotating tenders for contractors to handle huge tonnages. By mid-2025, the MCD
reported scaling biomining capacity across the three sites from earlier daily rates to tens of thousands of tonnes; officials say the aim is now to process large daily volumes so that legacy waste is reduced on a sustained basis rather than in fits and starts. Yet the arrival of fresh municipal waste, the city’s everyday, unavoidable output, continues to complicate the arithmetic.
Until fresh waste is segregated and routed to alternative processing facilities, every tonne cleared risks being replaced.
Life around landfill
For those who live near Bhalswa, the landfill is not just an eyesore but a daily health hazard. Toxic smoke from frequent fires, foul odour, and contaminated groundwater make life miserable. “Every summer, the landfill catches fire, and we choke on the smoke for weeks,” said Shabnam, who lives barely a kilometre away. Doctors in the area often report a rise in respiratory illnesses during these periods. Children suffer skin infections, and livestock have been known to fall sick after consuming polluted water. Yet, complaints rarely lead to sustained action.
“Authorities come only when the media reports it. After that, nothing changes,” said Mohammad Irfan, a local shopkeeper. Beyond health, the landfill affects the social fabric of the neighbourhood. Families often keep their windows shut throughout the day, making cramped homes even more stifling in the city’s sweltering summers. Weddings and social functions are sometimes shifted elsewhere because of the smell.
Residents complain that property prices in the area have stagnated, with outsiders reluctant to move into a place so close to what they call a “mountain of death.”
Schoolchildren growing up in Bhalswa Dairy Colony say they feel embarrassed when classmates from other parts of the city mock them for living near the garbage hill.
Many homemakers describe how vegetables and clothes smell foul if left outside for too long. Some of them have even stopped storing water in open containers because of the fear of contamination and mosquitoes.
Adding to their misery is the sense of neglect. “It feels like we don’t exist for the authorities until there is a fire or a court order,” said 60-year-old
Sunita Devi, who has lived in the colony since the landfill first came up.
“We are citizens of Delhi too, but no one cares about the poison we breathe every day.”
On the ground
Walking the slopes of Bhalswa is not the same as reading a progress report. On-site biomining looks like a construction yard: JCBs and excavators slice into layers of compressed trash, rommels separate inert rubble from compostable waste and combustible fractions and windrows of waste are tumbled and aerated to accelerate decomposition. Contractors produce outputs, soil-like material suitable for capping, recyclable plastics and metals, refuse-derived fuel, but they also produce dust, noise, and the risk of fire when methane-rich pockets are exposed. Fires have periodically broken out at Bhalswa over the years, sending plumes of smoke across neighbouring localities and reminding residents that remediation itself can be hazardous if not meticulously managed.
The human story under the machinery is less easy to quantify: hundreds, often thousands, of informal waste workers depend on Bhalswa for a living. Ragpickers walk the ridgelines and the lower gullies, separating bottles, cloth, copper wire and whatever can be sold; whole families live in makeshift settlements at the base of the dump. For them, a flattened hill could mean both better air and water, and a loss of livelihood unless rehabilitation and alternative work are part of the plan.
Municipal announcements about health camps and cash incentives for sanitation workers, such as the recent decision to provide a Rs 5,000
Diwali bonus to workers engaged at Delhi’s three landfill sites, are welcome but no substitute for systematic protections: protective gear, formal employment, health surveillance and avenues for transition out of hazardous informal work. Officials have flagged worker welfare as part of the clean-up narrative; advocates say measures so far have been piecemeal and need long-term commitment.
An ambitious finale
In mid-September 2025, civic authorities launched what they describe as the third and final phase of integrated biomining at Bhalswa. The MCD’s documents and press briefings set a bold target: remove roughly 40 lakh metric tonnes (about four million tonnes) of legacy waste by December 2026, and sustain daily processing targets in the scale of tens of thousands of tonnes to meet that schedule.
Alongside the machinery and tenders, the administration is trying to stop fresh waste from being added to legacy dumps during remediation: a site in Singhola has been identified as a processing location for fresh waste, another is being scouted in the Ghazipur area, and the idea is to segregate refuse at source so that fresh refuse is treated from day one instead of being consigned to a new heap.
These two elements, high throughout biomining plus guaranteed diversion of fresh waste, are the conditions the MCD says will make a genuine, durable reduction possible.
The rhetoric has been amplified by political interest. The Union Urban Affairs Minister has publicly “adopted” Bhalswa and ordered closer coordination between central and local agencies; in September, he announced worker incentives and health drives and said the centre would support operational logistics, including land assistance from the Delhi Development Authority.
Officials point to progress already recorded: reductions in mound height, reclaimed acreage measured in dozens of acres and large volumes processed since the biomining programme began.
Why it Matters Beyond the Skyline
Bhalswa’s problem is not merely local. It is a concentrated expression of how cities handle material consumption, how governance manages long-term environmental liabilities, and how politics frames technical work as a sequence of promises.
If the new phase of biomining achieves its targets and fresh waste is truly diverted, Bhalswa could become a case study in reclaiming degraded urban land and restoring liveability for nearby communities.
If it fails or slips again, the site will remain a cautionary tale: big targets without equally big capacity and social safeguards simply postpone the next crisis. For residents who measure city interventions in the day’s air, the week’s smoke and the month’s work opportunities, the question is practical: will the next monsoon leave the slopes intact, will the smoke stop, and will children stop catching coughs they do not outgrow? Technical reports, press releases and political photos will matter only to the extent they improve life on the ground. The coming year, with its tenders to be executed and its promises to be tested, will tell whether Bhalswa can move from being a visible symbol of failure to a genuine example of urban remediation, or whether it will once again be a reminder that cleaning up a city takes more than headlines.