Garbage blocks half of Gurgaon-Faridabad highway

GURGAON: The city’s garbage spill has annexed new territory – a portion of the Gurgaon-Faridabad road that cuts through the Aravalis.
Overflowing waste from the Bandhwari landfill, ironically the site that the National Green Tribunal (NGT) wanted cleared and for which it slapped Rs 100 crore as environment compensation on the state govt, disrupted city-bound traffic from Faridabad on Monday.A long line of garbage-laden trucks waiting to enter the landfill added to the problem, holding up motorists behind them.
The city has been living through a garbage disposal crisis for several months now. Last month, Haryana govt declared a ‘solid waste exigency’ in Gurgaon and invoked the Disaster Management Act to form a six-member committee. This panel was tasked with overseeing implementation of what the govt called Solid Waste Environment Exigency Programme (SWEEP).
On the ground, though, little has improved and, like it did on Monday, the problem appears to be manifesting in new places.
“Agencies and authorities have been dumping waste, claiming that it is inert, in the Aravalis and surrounding villages. Waste is now openly spilling onto the Gurgaon-Faridabad road, and no govt agency is being held accountable for it,” Jitender Bhadana, an environmentalist and resident of Pali village near Bandhwari, said on Monday.
Bhadana said it was becoming increasingly difficult to pass the stretch with overflowing waste. “It’s not just the traffic or waste overflowing. The stench is difficult to bear,” he said.
Asked about the problem, MCG commissioner Narhari Singh Banger denied that garbage was overflowing from the landfill site.
“It is the waste that is falling off trucks while the drivers are offloading garbage. We were earlier transporting 800 tonnes of waste daily to Bandhwari. It has significantly increased to 3,000 tonnes per day as we are trying to clear the secondary waste collection points in the city,” Banger told TOI.
The MCG chief said the corporation is already dealing with a “significant challenge of space constraint at Bandhwari”, and he has directed officials to ensure that “waste scattered outside the landfill is cleared”.
Spread over 28.9 acres of land, the landfill is surrounded by Aravali hills.
MCG sources told TOI that one of the reasons it is becoming difficult to manage waste could be that 83 trucks are carrying garbage from the city to Bandhwari in one go in a day. Earlier, 30-40 trucks would make several trips daily to carry garbage from Gurgaon and Faridabad to the landfill site, they said. Asked why this change, sources said that MCG recently issued a final termination notice to its waste concessionaire, which was also responsible for transporting civic waste to Bandhwari from the city. After the notice, MCG directly hired truckers to transport waste.
MCG has been struggling to follow up on a deadline to clear legacy waste from Bandhwari despite directions from NGT in September 2022. At the time, the tribunal had also imposed Rs 100 crore as environmental compensation on the state govt for damage caused to the Aravalis and nearby areas.
Since the tribunal’s ruling, the deadline to clear waste has been extended at least two times.
MCG told the green tribunal late last year that it will clear all 23.5 lakh MT of legacy waste by the end of June 2024, but according to latest data by the corporation, there is still 11.1 lakh metric tonnes of garbage lying unprocessed at the landfill site.
The corporation, which is yet to find alternatives for processing garbage generated by the city, has estimated that 3.3 lakh MT of fresh waste will be dumped in Bandhwari between June 19 and Dec this year.
On Sunday, MCG officials said the process to clear legacy waste had slowed down due to rainfall. “It has come down from 8,000 tonnes per day to 4,000 tonnes per day. Rains have disrupted the processing work,” an MCG official said.
Sunil Harsana, an environmentalist who lives in Mangar village adjoining Bandhwari, alleged that water bodies, groundwater and soil are being contaminated in the region around the landfill. “Residual waste is being dumped indiscriminately in villages and unauthorised farmhouses. The sarpanches of the villages are being bribed, so that nobody raises objections. One can easily spot waste dumped in a 15km radius of the landfill,” he alleged.
TOI had reported in March about mounds of residual waste, among them plastics and rags, being dumped at vacant plots in Dabua and Pali villages of Faridabad by trucks carrying garbage from the Bandhwari landfill. MCG officials had said at the time that compost was being dumped after waste was treated.
A few weeks before this, on Feb 19, a private lab collected samples of waste dumped in Bandhwari’s low-lying areas to test if it was inert waste or compost. The analysis report is pending.
Experts say the city’s garbage disposal crisis comes down to its inability to decentralise the process of waste management. Gurgaon and Faridabad, both NCR cities with growing populations, dump all garbage at Bandhwari every day. And compliance of Solid Waste Management Rules, which say that garbage must be treated at the source, is next to non-existent.
The matter came to the notice of the Supreme Court this June, with the bench remarking on the state of affairs of waste management in Delhi-NCR after being told that 5,600 tonnes of garbage was going untreated every day in Delhi, Gurgaon and Faridabad.
The SC bench observed that the issue needs to be immediately addressed and directed the Union ministry of housing and urban affairs to convene a meeting of all municipal bodies in NCR to come up with a solution. The central govt's affidavit submitted to SC noted that Gurgaon’s capacity to treat waste was 150 tonnes per day (TPD), though the city generated 1,200 TPD.