Dangers and Mismanagement of Landfills in India: A review



1,27,486 tonnes of waste was generated daily in India in 2011-12 of which Mumbai alone accounted for 6.11 per cent. Every resident in the metropolis generates about 630 grams of waste daily, and it is expected to touch 1 kg in the coming years. A city that's striving for land. This leaves its planners with an extremely difficult choice — where to dump? The municipal corporations are responsible to dispose the wastes in a safe way. Even the developed nations face the issue of waste disposal but there is a major difference – developed nations are able to achieve high levels of source segregation and have also done much more scientific research on the various disposal techniques and have also implemented them through active public-private participation.

Firstly, Indiafalls short when it comes to the space in the cities to dispose off the waste. Secondly, even after having a waste management policy, the current system don’t have the required technological capabilities and therefore there hasn’t been an effective implementation of the same.

Landfill Site pyrocrat system review suhas dixit
A landfill site

Apart from the obvious environmental hazards, there are other losses due to this – the healthcare costs rises because of the air and water pollution happening in the surroundings of the dumping yard, it also adds to the remedial costs for mitigating the contamination of water table due to the seepage of the waste into it. Moreover, this results in a fall in the local economy due to uninhabitable conditions, resulting in migration, thereby creating a social disaster as well. It would lead to a big economic crisis too, which the Govt doesn’t seem to care and thinks least to address at the moment.

Just quick-fix solutions are been provided. The sole beneficiaries of it are the ventures providing them. Collecting garbage and dumping them in the outskirts of the city is a business of thousands of crores. With no investment made in the proper disposal of wastes, the profit margins for these businesses are extremely high. A huge illegal nexus of municipalities has evolved with land owners who earn quick money by leasing out agricultural and wetlands for waste disposal. Even though these landfills being (mis)managed by these ventures are unscientific, no one seems to be doing anything, probably because of the political support which these players have.

The way to fight this problem is for the government to ensure that the policies of the Municipal Solid Wastes (Management and Handling) Rules, 2000 must be implemented properly. Schedule III of the policy framework defines the specifications of landfill sites. If followed, it should never pose the problems currently being faced. However, hardly any of the rules seem to be in place. What is most needed is proper execution of the same and strict actions against the offenders. Moreover, the rules should be modified to include the ragpicker network by incorporating them into the initial level of segregation rather than bypassing them and handing over that chunk of work to corporates.


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