At Okhla dump, Sisodia doubles down on vow to rid Capital of its landfills

It was the first visit by a top AAP leader to the landfill after the party came to power in the Municipal Corporation of Delhi.

Deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia on Wednesday visited the Okhla landfill site to inspect the ongoing work to flatten the garbage dump which holds nearly 6 million tones of legacy waste.

Delhi deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia at the Okhla landfill site in New Delhi on Wednesday. (Vipin Kumar/HT Photo)

It was the first visit by a top AAP leader to the landfill after the party came to power in the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD). Sisodia, who was accompanied by AAP’s mayoral candidate Shelly Oberoi and deputy mayor aspirant Aaley Mohammed Iqbal, said the work to remove landfills in Delhi has started in “a mission mode”.

Delhi has three garbage mountains -- one each at Okhla (south), Bhalswa (north) and Ghazipur (east) -- and flattening them one of the key poll promises by the AAP in the run up to the MCD polls.

“Clearing the garbage mountains of Delhi in Ghazipur, Okhla and Bhalswa was not the priority of the previous government, hence the height of these landfill sites kept on growing in the past 15 years. But now, under the leadership of CM Shri Arvind Kejriwal, we are ready with an action plan to eliminate these garbage mounds from Delhi. After the election of Mayor and Deputy Mayor is completed on January 6, the government will work on a war footing to free Delhi from these garbage mounds,” Sisodia stated.

“From now onwards, I will inspect these landfill sites every week and closely monitor the work. As soon as the mayor and deputy mayor will take oath, the speed of the clearing process will be doubled,” he added. The mayoral elections is scheduled for January 6.

The BJP, however, dismissed the visit by Sisodia, and said that the AAP was trying to claim credit for the works launched by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) during its rule in the MCD.

Delhi BJP working president Virender Sachdeva said Sisodia’s visit to Okhla landfill site was designed to mislead the people. “On October 20, Union home minister Amit Shah inaugurated the waste to energy power plant in Tughlakabad, and from that day all the garbage of south Delhi goes straight to this plant. Since then, 6000 metric tonnes of inert (garbage ash) waste is being lifted daily from the Okhla landfill site. The municipal corporation had declared that the Okhla landfill site will be cleared before the G-20 summit in September 2023. Similarly, during BJP’s rule works were launched to remove both the other landfill sites in a time-bound manner,” Sachdeva said.

The Bhalswa landfill site was commissioned in 1994 and has accumulated 8 million tones of legacy waste, with the site exhausting its capacity in 2006. The Okhla site was commissioned in 1994 and holds 6 million tones of legacy waste, with the site exhausting its capacity in 2010. The Ghazipur site is Delhi’s oldest and was commissioned in 1984, and has already accumulated 14 million tones of legacy waste. In 2019, following an order by the National Green Tribunal (NGT order), the three municipal corporations started carrying out bio-mining and bio-remediation. However, with fresh dumping still continuing, the pace of clearing inert legacy waste has remained slow.