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Guest column: Why Chandigarh must worry about Dadumajra dump
A study by PEC found that soil around the dumping site had a high concentration of copper and zinc, which can potentially damage liver, kidney, and intestine
The old adage ‘out of sight out of mind’ best explains the popular indifference to mountains of garbage outside cities. In Chandigarh, we wake up to our smoky heap at Dadumajra only when its stench starts wafting down to our sector, when it catches fire, or when we drive through the leachate-laced roads on the way to the swiftly expanding New Chandigarh.
But there are many compelling reasons why the garbage needs to weigh on our minds. The first is our health. A 2017 study by Punjab Engineering College published in the International Journal of Scientific Research and Engineering Trends found that soil around the dump had a significantly high concentration of copper and zinc, which can potentially damage your liver, kidney, and intestine besides causing stomach-related problems, respiratory disorders, and nausea.
Locals at Dadumajra are already battling severe skin allergies and respiratory ailments. The annual fires in the dump release toxins that reach the other end of Chandigarh and the slime continues to poison the soil which scientists fear contaminates the groundwater too. As the crush of habitation continues around Dadumajra — a police colony is being built alongside — the risk posed by this dump will only multiply.
Till 2006, Dadumajra was a sleepy village with clean air, green shrubs, and a pond in which the locals bathed. Then Chandigarh bureaucrats decided to turn it into their wasteland. It began with trucks dumping garbage into the pond, which disappeared. And then Dadumajra grew exponentially, both horizontally and vertically. It is now spread across 28 acres with two sites, and a third one growing fast — dooming a population of over 50,000 to life amid nausea-inducing stench.
Even though the central government instituted a set of impeccably crafted waste management rules, which if followed can stop the dumping site from growing and keep our city genuinely clean, the rules are being either partially followed, ignored, or blatantly flouted by Chandigarh municipal corporation, the authority that is supposed to implement them. Year after year, they continue to submit documents showing 100% compliance, while conveniently ignoring 100% implementation.
The civic body has been generous in spending money on the dump, but with little or no change on the ground. Since 2019, it has spent over ₹100 crore for the remediation of 28 acres with no visible improvement on the site. Every now and then, it inaugurates a new plan with a big budget and much show but little outcome, the latest being the ₹68-crore project to clear old waste, called legacy mining, for the second time in three years. A week later, the Chandigarh Pollution Control Board put the brakes on it, saying it had not cleared the project.
Indore, however, spent ₹54 crore, a fraction of the sum spent by Chandigarh MC in the last three years, to transform a 50-year-old dumping site spread over 100 acres, almost four times bigger than our ‘Mount Garbage’. They started working on it in 2016, and the area was converted into a forest by 2018. It took them 24 months. We started spending money on processing the garbage much earlier, but a drive to Dadumajra shows where we have arrived.
This was why Chandigarh governor Banwarilal Purohit had sent our councillors to Indore to study its waste disposal mechanism even though they wanted to go to Goa. Incidentally, councillors and officers have splurged crores on study tours in India and abroad, but with little to show on the ground.
Interestingly, Indore isn’t the only place that managed to find a solution. There are several other examples where dumping site remediation has been done successfully by implementing the waste management rules across the country. Case studies of Vijaywada, Bhopal, Kuberpur, and Vadodra are even available in the public domain.
It’s a double whammy for Chandigarh. Firstly, we have failed to clear the legacy waste, and then, we have not stopped dumping the garbage at Dadumajra.
The management rules state that wet waste, mostly from kitchens, and horticulture waste need to be decentralised and composted. The civic body has only done one part of the job -- it spent a few crores to construct compost pits, and that’s all. Composting is a scientific process that needs some human intervention. The RWAs can be roped in to help, but the MC has chosen to move on to more big-budget projects, like buying more vehicles and setting up more plants, which are not required.
Their failure at composting is evident from their own report that shows they produce only 5% of compost from the total waste they process, where the benchmark is 50%-60%. The rest of the waste is labelled ‘inert’ and dumped in the landfill. And the vicious cycle carries on.
Experts from Punjab Engineering College and National Institute of Technical Teachers Training and Research have easy solutions. With big-budget projects in waste management on the anvil, the MC authorities will do well to lend them an ear and evaluate the viability of their solutions. That may help find better and economical ways to deal with Chandigarh’s waste woes. The bottom line is to prevent the crores of taxpayers’ money from going down the dump, literally.
amit2sharma@gmail.com
(The writer is a Chandigarh-based green activist and one of the petitioners in the Punjab and Haryana HC on Dadumajra dump case. Views expressed are his personal)
