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No end to Chandigarh’s trash trouble as third mountain rises at Dadumajra dump
The alarming update was shared by the Chandigarh municipal corporation in an affidavit submitted to the Punjab and Haryana high court, along with another worrisome admission that the entire garbage at Dadumajra will now take a daunting 43 months to clear
The city’s garbage crisis shows no sign of abating, as a third mountain of waste, holding a massive 1.25 lakh metric tonnes (MT) of waste, has emerged at the Dadumajra landfill.
The alarming update was shared by the Chandigarh municipal corporation in an affidavit submitted to the Punjab and Haryana high court, along with another worrisome admission that the entire garbage at Dadumajra will now take a daunting 43 months — more than three years — to clear, a result of unabated dumping of unsegregated and unprocessed daily waste.
The civic body is presently collecting around 500 tonnes per day (TPD) waste from the city, of which around 300 tonnes is wet, including horticulture waste, while the remaining is dry. The civic body says that 100% of waste is being collected door-to-door from households in four categories: dry, wet, sanitary, and domestic hazardous waste.
But though MC is able to process 430 tonnes of segregated waste daily through separate wet and dry waste processing plants, the remaining 70 tonnes of mixed waste cannot be processed and is dumped at the landfill.
As per MC officials, despite a combination of adequate labour and capital intensive waste management efforts to achieve 100% segregation of waste at source, approximately 70 tonnes of mix/unsegregated waste is being collected daily and manual segregation of this waste is not possible.
However, in the affidavit, MC officials said, “The work to upgrade the existing dry waste treatment plant was completed on December 1, 2022, and the wet waste plant capacity was upgraded on February 29, 2024. Despite best waste management efforts of MC to achieve 100% segregation of waste, there was some quantity of inseparable mixed waste prior to December 4, 2024.of about 50 to 100 TPD being generated and collected from across the city and being dumped at the dumping ground daily, leading to formation of an additional temporary dump of 1.25 lakh MT, which is also required to be remediated to make the city dump free.”
Waste woes mount
Due to inadequate waste processing facilities, the waste management journey of Chandigarh has already been chequered, resulting in two legacy waste mountains of 5 lakh MT and 8 lakh MT at the Dadumajra landfill in the past decades.
The entire 5 lakh MT waste, dumped before 2005, was processed and cleared by December 2022 under a Smart City project.
Meanwhile, bio-remediation of the second mountain of 8 lakh MT is presently being done by MC under the Swachh Bharat Mission-2. As per MC, out of 8 lakh MT of legacy waste, 7.80 lakh MT has been processed till date.
“The entire work of left-over biomining of about 20,000 MT, along with the additional temporary dump of about 1.25 lakh MT, would be completed within 43 months,” MC officials said in the affidavit.
Spread across 45.11 acres, the landfill is located right in the middle of a residential area, with residents of Dadumajra, Sector 38 (West), Sector 25 and Dhanas Colony being most exposed.
In almost every house located in the vicinity of the Dadumajra landfill, people are suffering from health hazards including allergies, asthma, skin ailments, tuberculosis (TB), cancer, paralysis and other chronic diseases. The residents of Dadumajra have been voicing strong opposition to the establishment of an Integrated Solid Waste Management (ISWM) processing plant in their locality, urging officials to find an alternative site in Chandigarh or its surroundings. The Union ministry has yet to issue environmental clearance for the plant.
Aimed at effectively tackling the city’s daily waste generation of 500 metric tonnes (MT), the new plant, with a capacity of 600 tonnes per day, is proposed to comprise three facilities – one each for dry, wet and horticulture waste. With the tender yet to be finalised, it will take another two years to come up.
High Court seeks response on allegations from the petitioner
During the hearing, the high court asked MC to file pictures of the site and detailed replies to key applications, alleging systemic mismanagement of the Dadumajra garbage dump. The court was hearing a PIL filed by city residents against mounting health and environmental hazards caused by the site.
The PILs, originally filed in 2016 and later combined with another petition in 2021, highlight grave concerns over toxic waste accumulation and repeated violations of waste management laws.
During the hearing, MC sought to transfer the case to the National Green Tribunal (NGT), citing an ongoing case there.
However, advocate Amit Sharma, the petitioner appearing in person, opposed the move, calling it a calculated attempt to evade accountability. “MC has a history of using one or the other pretext to delay or deflect from the issue. Now, they’re using the NGT proceedings as a pretext for inaction,” Sharma argued.
Sharma also drew attention to two critical applications that remained unanswered or insufficiently addressed by MC. An application filed earlier this year seeks detailed explanations about MC’s waste management strategy, compliance with environmental laws and discrepancies in earlier submissions. The second application questions MC’s compliance with fundamental environmental laws and its decision to establish a landfill on a water body located less than 10 feet from a residential area. The case stands adjourned till January 15.
