Dec ’26 is new deadline to clear Delhi’s Okhla landfill

The Okhla landfill cleanup deadline has been extended to December 2026, as officials struggle with waste disposal and progress slows during monsoons.

New Delhi

The Okhla landfill. (HT Archive)

The deadline to clean up mounds of legacy and fresh waste at the Okhla landfill has been pushed back, as officials grapple to dispose of waste despite repeated revisions of deadlines to clear the area and flatten the land. This year alone, the deadline of July was initially extended to October, and now it has been pushed back to December, according to officials aware of the matter.

Mayor Parvesh Wahi, who inspected biomining work at the landfill site on Wednesday, said in a statement: “An inspection of the Okhla landfill site was conducted with the commissioner. The waste will be cleared before December 2026. So far, approximately half of the land has been cleared.”

Wahi said that the project was going on at a steady pace and that around 23 acres of the Okhla landfill site has been cleared. “The legacy waste accumulated at the Okhla landfill site would be disposed of within approximately one week. Fresh waste arriving at the Okhla landfill site would also be processed and disposed of by December 2026,” he said.

The biomining project at the site was started on the orders of the National Green Tribunal (NGT) on July 17, 2019, when all civic bodies were ordered to start biomining and bioremediation of waste sites to reclaim the land within one year, with substantial progress stipulated within six months. Biomining is a process of separating various components of legacy waste, such as plastic, paper, cloth, sand, and bricks, by passing them through trommel machines, which act as cylindrical rotating sieves.

According to a status report on biomining project, as of June 8, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) logged 9.97 million tonnes of garbage across three landfill sites. The Okhla landfill accounted for 1.23 million tonnes, the Bhalswa landfill for 1.84 million tonnes and the Ghazipur landfill for 6.9 million tonnes. Overall, 73 acres have been reclaimed from across three sites.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, upon being elected in 2025, aimed to clear the Okhla landfill by July 2026 and the Bhalswa landfill by December 2026.

A senior MCD official, who did not wish to be named, said: “Dumping of fresh waste at the site has slowed down the net progress. The biomining work slows down significantly during the monsoon season. We are targeting to complete the work within these constraints.”