On the night of 27 January 2016, a big fire broke out in the Deonar garbage dumping ground. This is Mumbai’s oldest and largest dumping ground, receiving almost 4,000 tonnes of garbage everyday from the 10000 tonnes that the city generates, as per municipal statements.
The fire burned strong, generating thick acrid smoke, which soon spread in a broad swathe about 20 km long and 5 km wide, but the effects were felt even further than the immediate influence zone. Winter winds ensured that Central and South Mumbai were the worst affected.
What was burning?
What was burning was just about everything that you can think of. Household garbage, which forms the bulk of the waste coming to the dumping ground, is unsegregated as a rule in Mumbai. There are roughly 12 million citizens as per the last census and half of them stay in slums. Each citizen generates roughly 500 gm of waste everyday, which is collected either at the building doorstep or from community bins. Since people do not bother to segregate the waste into recyclable or non-recyclable, food and non-food or dry and wet categories, one can imagine everything from paper, plastic, metal, electronic waste, food waste to all be mixed together in a bhelpuri mix and being transported to the dump. The burning of plastic, metal and any electronic waste in an incomplete combustion like was happening at the dump, releases toxic fumes containing carcinogenic elements, and thus almost three million citizens were immediately affected by these very harmful fumes.
There is a strong recycling industry in the slums surrounding the Deonar dumping ground, which employs an army of collectors who scavenge the dumping ground in groups, very efficiently identifying different categories of waste, collecting them in large bags and then bringing them down to be sold to the recycling units.
The coconut shells and husk he was selling to bakeries, which found it to be a good fuel. The shells which had been crushed in a compactor truck, had been mixed with all other kinds of waste, and travelled many kilometers to be thrown at the dump and then retrieved to be burnt in a bakery furnace.
A casual look around showed numerous other rag pickers very assiduously going about with their collections. All materials easily recognisable as daily discards from urban lifestyles and existence. It needs no great expertise to realise that almost all the items that get classified as garbage and to be dumped somewhere far away are actually resources, which have other uses. None of them should have reached the dumping ground in the first place, having been collected and transported from the source of generation to the source of consumption in the recycling unit.
For as long as I have been involved with solid waste management, the simple principle for management has been to price right each waste item. Once the price has been established, an ecosystem of collectors and transporters develops for every item, ensuring that no garbage reaches the dumping grounds.
All of this has been well observed and documented in numerous court appointed committees, pollution control board committees and other government wings. In 2000, the Government of India formulated the Municipal Solid Waste Management Rules 2000 under the Environment Protection Act of 1986. The rules were a result of the extensive research by the Burman Committee which itself was formed as a result of the Public Interest Litigation in Supreme Court by Almitra Patel in 1996. The rules very simply translated, mandated all municipal corporations of Class I cities to ensure that they reduce the amount of waste reaching dumping grounds by enforcing segregation of waste at source, and giving support and encouragement for treatment of food waste at source by means like composting.
The Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai was undertaking commendable measures for a few years till 2005, until the concept of PPP (Public Private Partnership) seemed to take root in the thinking. A consultant was hired and the report formed the basis for increased centralisation of waste disposal and an over emphasis on using centralised facilities like garbage dumps or landfills for disposal. All of this was completely contrary to the spirit and key recommendations of the MSW 2000 Rules.
Mumbai is in the process of making a new Development Plan and in early 2014 numerous inputs have been provided to the corporation along these lines.
TB and lung cancer – gifts of the garbage dumps
The Govandi area in the immediate vicinity of the dump is a hot bed of tuberculosis (TB) and lung cancer. I spoke with a group of about 20 youth in the age group of 10-25 playing cricket at the edges of the dump, everybody expressed concern and had a tale of woe to share. Apparently, 80 percent of Mumbai’s tuberculosis cases are from this area. Not everybody here is involved with collection of waste at the dump and the recycling industry, but they are held hostage due to the writ of the recyclers, which runs large in this area.
At climate change talks India keeps speaking of climate justice and demands the same from the industrialised west, but where is a sense of corresponding justice from the State of India to its most marginalised sections of the city? And as was borne in the case of the Deonar fire, even the wealthiest in Mumbai were not spared. Segregating garbage at source, supporting waste management entrepreneurs in the hundreds and ensuring that minimal waste reaches dumping grounds is not rocket science. It is not something which needs financial support from the West or technology.
In the past decade I have seen numerous western business delegations pitch in the city to help with managing the city’s waste. The hotels and tour organisers become rich by organising their visits, but the delegation members themselves never get any business, finding it impossible to navigate through the mess of dealing with the municipal corporation. A far larger number of local entrepreneurs keep struggling even after willing to bring their own funding.
At a time when as a nation we are communicating that we are serious about a number of developmental goals, it would be good that numerous slogans like Swachh Bharat, Make in India and Startup India are combined to usher in an era where the government provides a healthy ecosystem for thousands of waste entrepreneurs to flourish, thus completely doing away with the need for garbage dumps in any city of India.
