MCG urges state govt to stop dumping Faridabad waste at Bandhwari landfill
The MCG has also requested that an alternative landfill site be identified to ease the pressure on Bandhwari, where 1,200 tonnes of untreated waste from Faridabad and Gurugram is dumped daily, MCG commissioner Yashpal Yadav said on Monday.
Following last week’s order by the National Green Tribunal (NGT), which took a serious view of the “sorry state of affairs” at the Bandhwari landfill, the Municipal Corporation of Gurugram (MCG) has requested the chief secretary of the Haryana government to halt the flow of Faridabad’s garbage to the dump yard.
The MCG has also requested that an alternative landfill site be identified to ease the pressure on Bandhwari, where 1,200 tonnes of untreated waste from Faridabad and Gurugram is dumped daily, MCG commissioner Yashpal Yadav said on Monday.
“Keeping in view the overload on the Bandhwari site, we raised the issue with the chief secretary that the dumping of Faridabad’s waste in the landfill should be discontinued,” Yadav said.
Implementing this would reduce the amount of waste dumped in Bandhwari by about 300 tonnes daily. “The chief secretary to the Haryana government, Depinder Singh Dhesi, has instructed Sameer Saro, director, Haryana urban local bodies, to assess the feasibility of these requests,” Yadav said.
The MCG has also asked the state government to reconsider a four-year-old proposal to start a landfill in Faridabad’s Pali Mohbtabad village, where an abandoned mining pit, about 92 acres in size, was identified in 2015 for the purpose of dumping Faridabad’s municipal waste.
“In the absence of this alternative landfill, the strain on Bandhwari has become immense,” Yadav said.
Activists, however, are opposed to this proposal. Jeetendra Bhadana of Save Aravalli, a non-governmental organisation, said, “The land in Pali Mohbtabad was revealed to be situated on protected forest land, under sections 4 and 5 of the Punjab Land Preservation Act (PLPA), as per a 2015 RTI response. It would be irresponsible to start any kind of dumping there.” In 2015, people from almost 20 villages protested the landfill, following which the Haryana government discontinued its endeavour to denotify the area’s PLPA notification. “Interestingly, even the Bandhwari landfill site is situated on a PLPA land, making the practice of dumping there thoroughly illegal even if all scientific methods of waste management are followed. There simply cannot be any non-forestry activities in the Aravallis,” Bhadana added.
The NGT, last Tuesday, came down heavily on MCG and concessionaire for waste management in the city Ecogreen Energy for the “sorry state of affairs” at the Bandhwari landfill site.
The court instructed the chief secretary to the government of Haryana to intervene. The next date of hearing in the matter is May 27.
A senior MCG official, who did not wish to be quoted, said that the civic body’s request for an alternative landfill is likely to be submitted before the Tribunal on that date, along with the chief secretary’s action-taken report.