4min chapter

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Can Delhi clear its garbage dumps?

Finshots Daily

CHAPTER

Challenges and Progress in Delhi's Garbage Management

Delhi's ongoing struggles with waste management, including challenges in waste segregation, illegal dumping, and the introduction of new initiatives like ward-wise segregation and engineered landfills.

00:00
Speaker 2
Look
Speaker 1
the height of the dirt piles at Delhi's three major dumping grounds has only increased over the years. And it's not because there's no work in progress. Delhi initiated efforts to clear up its legacy waste way back in 2019. And the trummel machines used in the process can separate about 2,500 tons of garbage every day. That should have easily cleared over half of the trash that the Ghazi poor dumping ground shoulders. But more fresh waste coming in on a daily basis means that all its attempts prove futile. To put things in perspective this site receives up to 3,000 tons of MSW every single day, replenishing the legacy waste that is being by your mind.
Speaker 2
Now we know what
Speaker 1
you're thinking. Can't Delhi just stop dumping fresh waste on these overflowing heaps?
Speaker 2
You wish. But herein lies the problem.
Speaker 1
Delhi simply does not have enough land that it can use as an alternative dumping ground. In fact, the three existing dumping grounds that we've been talking about all this while are not even authorized by the Delhi Pollution Control Board. Municipal bodies simply keep using them because they have no other option. Even if it tries to acquire more land, the government simply may not have that kind of money to budget for this arrangement. So comparing Delhi's dumping grounds to Bhopal or Indoor may not be fair because these cities made sure that fresh waste had separate dumping grounds where it was properly segregated right from the start. And yes, waste segregation is a problem as well. Most of the city's waste isn't centrally managed. So you don't have folks on the municipal cooperation going door to door and collecting these segregated waste in most parts of Delhi. This is still spread across informal players who pay to secure contracts area-wise. They then deploy one worker per cluster of households which have to pay a fee of up to 250 rupees a month for the service. This makes way for two big problems. One, unsegregated waste adds up to the existing piles at Delhi's dumping grounds and two, a huge chunk of construction and demolition, or CND waste, ends up getting illegally dumped into these cities. Delhi actually generates the maximum CND waste in India upwards of 6,000 tons every day. And despite the city, year marking over 150 sites for waste of that kind, the lack of a centrally managed disposal system only makes things worse. But does that mean Delhi can't overcome its heap of waste management problems? Not really, because
Speaker 2
there still may
Speaker 1
be a sliver of hope. For starters, Delhi has slowly begun implementing municipal ward-wise plans to completely segregate its waste. The folks at the MCD have begun sending their waste collection vehicles to every ward. They plan to steadily increase their fleet of vehicles, fetch daily status reports of work being done with photographs, and finally monitor all waste collection vehicles through GPS tags. And this has made way for a small bit of progress according to the latest Delhi Economic Survey report. About 80 out of 250 wards falling under the MCD now have over 80% of the waste segregated. Another silver lining is that Delhi just got a new engineered landfill at
Speaker 2
Tehkhand. This means
Speaker 1
that the treated waste from its existing dumping grounds would be diverted to this new landfill to process the residue. Now here's something you may not know. Dumping grounds are very different from landfills. Although we often use these terms interchangeably, landfills are scientifically planned waste disposal sites which prevent gases and hazardous residue in the waste from leaching into the soil or water.
Speaker 2
So yes,
Speaker 1
their site is exactly that. And if all of this goes as per plan, Delhi's biomining deadlines may not seem all that scary anymore. What do you
Speaker 2
think? Thank you for
Speaker 3
listening to today's episode. Fincharts Daily is available on a bunch of streaming platforms such as Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts. So make sure you follow us on your favourite podcast streaming platform. Until next time.

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