Okhla garbage mound will be cleared this year, says Kejriwal

The AAP made clearing “garbage mountains” of the Capital one of its key civic election promises, but the task itself is not expected to be easy

The Okhla garbage landfill will be cleared by December this year, months ahead of the May 2024 deadline, chief minister Arvind Kejriwal said on Friday during a visit with the city’s new mayor Shelly Oberoi.

Chief minister Arvind Kejriwal and mayor Shelly Oberoi visit the Okhla landfill site. (Raj K Raj/HT)

The AAP made clearing “garbage mountains” of the Capital one of its key civic election promises, but the task itself is not expected to be easy.

The current volume of the landfill is estimated at 4 million tonne, after being reduced by roughly 2 to 2.5 million tonne since the process to clear it began in 2019.

Kejriwal said at present, 4,500 tonne is being processed daily and this rate will be raised to 15,000 tonne a day by June.

“I will revisit the site on April 1 to review the progress. By April the disposal target is 10,000 TPD and by June, it is 15,000 TPD. Thus, we can easily achieve the target of clearing the landfill sites by December or January. The people living in the vicinity of the area will finally get relief,” he said.

“The target was to clear the landfill sites by May, 2024 but we will try to advance this deadline to December this year,” he added.

Presently, fresh garbage is not being dumped at the Okhla site. The waste has been diverted to Ghazipur and Bhalswa landfills. Delhi generates 11,332 tonnes of solid waste every day and 4,360 tonnes of the daily waste ends up at the landfill.

The daily waste generation of the city has gone up by around 237 tonnes a day rising from around 11,094.7 tonnes last year to 11,332 tonnes. HT reported on February 22that Delhi is currently able to process only 61.5% of the waste it generates, leading to more than 4,360 tonnes of garbage (1.59 million tons per day) piling up on its over-saturated landfill sites but the MCD plans to achieve 100% waste processing levels by adding new waste processing facilities by 2025.

Cleaning up the Capital, especially its three towering landfill sites that stick out for miles on the horizon for areas nearby, has been a political hot-button issue and assumes significant at a time AAP is in a bitter fight for control of the municipal corporation of Delhi (MCD) with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Processing waste at these sites is known as bio-mining, a process that separates various components of legacy waste such as plastic, paper, cloth, sand, bricks by passing them through a trommel machines that act as cylindrical rotating sieves.

Garbage dumping on the 46-acre site in Okhla began in 1994 and in 2019, at its peak, it reached a height of 40 metres – or roughly the height of a 12-storey building.

The project to flatten Delhi’s three landfills began in 2019, when they collectively held 28 million tonne of legacy waste. According to the latest report submitted to the National Green Tribunal on only 7.6 million tonne, or 27%, has been processed till February 14.

The NGT report shows 36% of 8 million tonnes of waste at Bhalswa and 16% of 14 million tonnes waste at Ghazipur has been removed so far, while the civic body continues to dump fresh waste on the garbage mounds.

Kejriwal said that the corporation has the capacity to dispose of 4,500 TPD (tonnes per day) waste which will be increased to 10,000 TPD by April 1 and ultimately to 15,000 TPD by June.

Once the entire site is cleared, the MCD plans to set up a construction and demolition waste processing plant and a bio-methanation plant to process the waste.

The chief minister will also inspect the other landfills – at Ghazipur and Bhalswa in the next two-three days, officials said.

Currently, the daily waste produced by Delhi is being either sent to waste-to-energy plants and the two landfill sites located in Ghazipur and Bhalswa. Responding to a query regarding the fresh waste being added to the landfills, Kejriwal said that many new waste-to-energy plants will be set up in coming days but as an interim measure, smaller biomethanation plants should be explored for treating the fresh waste. “When the waste to energy plants come up, these biomethanation plants can be disposed of. The discussion is taking place on these projects,” he added.

MCD mayor Oberoi tweeted: “Visited the Okhla Landfill with CM Shri Arvind Kejriwal, who reviewed the work in progress of garbage processing. He asked us to expedite the process so that we can finish the work of cleaning off the site by December this year, in contrast to the stipulated deadline - May ‘24”.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), meanwhile, said it was common knowledge that garbage from Okhla is being lifted on daily basis used to generate electricity via the Tughlaqabad waste-to-electricity plant. “MCD had already declared its target in November 2022 at the WtE plant’s inauguration stating the Okhla landfill site will be cleared in about a year. So there is nothing new in CM Kejriwal’s statement that Okhla landfill will be cleared by December 2023,” Delhi BJP spokesperson Praveen Shankar Kapoor said.