Top-down approach cannot keep our cities clean, focus on local bodies
India is stinking, and it is sinking in garbage. No, I am not talking about politics. I mean it literally. At the heart of Delhi, there are at least three mountains that are entirely manmade. Unlike nature, humans use garbage filled with plastic to make these smoking garbage mountains. Mount Ghazipur, Mount Okhla, and Mount Bhalswa are the new landmarks in our capital city.
Ghazipur is the biggest, encompassing over 70 acre and towering above the Taj Mahal, in terms of height. It fumes, erupts into flames, putrefies, emanates stench and spreads disease. Delhi produces 11,332 tonnes of solid waste daily, according to the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, and they don’t know what to do with that. So, they dumb it and make impressive landmarks that could serve as some hells described in Garuda Purana. In Mumbai, the garbage mountain at Deonar is 18 storeys high and growing every day.
An enormous mound of trash, spanning over 300 acre and reaching heights of approximately 125 ft, emits a constant plume of smoke. Expensive luxury condos worth crores of rupees surround this unsightly heap, weighing over 16 million tonne. One day, it would grow taller than Burj Khalifa. Our ‘Burj Kachara’ is not just a metropolitan-India problem.
Every town in India has its own garbage mountains. It may not be shocking anymore for Indians, who bristle with patriotism at the slightest criticism of this ill-managed country, to encounter garbage hills in their vicinity. Nor is it anybody’s concern that there are approximately 20 lakh rag pickers eking a living out of these garbage dumps.
We should be thankful to these dirt poor at the bottom of our accursed society, who are often treated with contempt. These rag pickers, the invisible ghouls of our society, put their hands where we would rather not even walk. They dive deep into these towering trash mountains, sifting through the refuse in search of recyclable material to sell and earn a pittance. It is anybody’s guess what would happen if India depended solely on our municipal bodies for waste management.
In January of 2018, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs released a ‘Protocol for Star Rating of Garbage-Free Cities’ as part of the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan. The goal was to become a clean nation by the end of October 2, 2019. A lot of money was spent on propaganda and lots of photographs and posters were printed.
Later, in 2021, the second phase of ‘Garbage Free’ cities was launched. Called Swachh Bharat 2.0, it had an even more ambitious goal of making all cities garbage-free. Well-intentioned rules were framed and instructions were sent to our infamous bureaucracy. Some of them were truly remarkable and would have shamed even Japan, if even half of them were implemented on the ground.
The orders were to ensure grey and black water management. There were strict instructions from the Union government that at any point of time in the day, no garbage or litter should be found in any public, commercial or residential locations, including in storm drains and water bodies. There were detailed notes on how to manage the 100 per cent of waste generated scientifically. There were plans for dealing with legacy waste. And to be fair, a few cities attempted to do at least a part of this, before falling back to their usual slumber. Now, look around. Does our country look ‘swachh’ by any definition?
The garbage mountains keep growing. Proper waste management is still a distant dream. Drains are choked with plastic waste. Stray cows roam around with bellies bloated with plastic. The rules also had stated that if the landfill sites have reached their saturation point then fresh waste dumping should be immediately banned. Most of these landfills reached their saturation points 25 years ago or earlier.
Even as the rest of the world shifts towards more efficient methods of waste disposal, India continues to languish in ignorance. Landfills have long been considered an outdated, unhealthy, and environmentally detrimental method of waste management. Most of the Swachh Bharat recommendations remain only on paper. The bureaucracy of our local governments has failed us once again.
Municipal corporations of India must be the most inefficient and corrupt organisations in the country. The focus of the media and the public is always on the central and state government and its ministers and officials. The local bodies escape scrutiny and get away with rampant corruption and gross mismanagement. We need a Swachh Bharat 3.0 and the responsibility has to be directly fixed on the local bodies and its officials for efficient management of the waste. We can’t clean our cities by a top-down approach. All the big hoardings and exhortations about clean India is not going to work unless we fix responsibilities and monitor the local bodies.
Anand Neelakantan
Author of Asura, Ajaya series, Vanara and Bahubali trilogy
mail@asura.co.in