New Delhi/ Bengaluru: “When the wind blows, a terrible stench spreads,” says Vimala Devi. She says that coughs are constant, as are cold-like illnesses – especially during the winters.
Devi lives in V.P. Singh Camp, a resettlement colony in south Delhi. Right next door is the notorious Okhla landfill – and this is where the stench comes from, as the wind blows.
“In the summer, a large amount of dust rises, making it even harder to breathe,” Devi told The Wire. “This directly impacts our health, and we frequently fall sick.”
Waste from both the South Delhi Municipal Corporation and Delhi Cantonment Board were disposed of in the Okhla landfill after 1996, when it was first commissioned.
Okhla is one of the three officially-acknowledged landfills in the national capital, near where living has become virtually impossible. The others are Ghazipur in east Delhi, where waste from the East Delhi Municipal Corporation is dumped; and Bhalswa where waste from the North Delhi Municipal Corporation finds its resting place. As a result, living near these areas has become virtually impossible.
Together, Ghazipur, Bhalswa and Okhla contained 28 million tonnes of legacy waste as of 2019, of which nearly 12 million tonnes has been cleared since July 2019, as per a report.
Meanwhile, pollution from vehicle emissions and other sources such as construction dust have also bogged down Delhi’s air quality over the last year, despite a huge drop in farm fires in Punjab, Haryana and neighbouring areas (which are usually blamed for Delhi’s poor air quality during this season), the city’s air quality plummeted in the winter of 2024.
And the Yamuna still flows dirty and frothy, as it snakes its way through Delhi. These are important environmental and health concerns that residents say they will keep in mind as they cast their votes on February 5.
Leaching landfills
“During every election, leaders from all political parties come here asking for votes and make promises, but nothing ever changes,” Suryanayan Paswan, who has been living in VP Singh Camp near the Okhla landfill since 1999, told The Wire.
According to one estimate, the Okhla landfill commissioned in 1996 spans across 62 acres and contains 6 million tonnes of legacy waste (waste that has built up over the years, and still continues to be environmental and health threats). Though the landfill was decommissioned in 2018, a team from New Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment observed fresh waste still being dumped at the site in 2023. Residents in VP Singh Camp claim that waste dumping at the site still continues.
Due to garbage continuing to be dumped in the Okhla landfill, water in the taps in the area contains sand and mud, Paswan alleged.
“Plastic, chemicals, and other waste are constantly dumped at the Okhla landfill. This has a direct impact on the health of our children, causing them to fall sick repeatedly.”
With water from taps and borewells always polluted in the area, almost every household in VP Singh Camp relies on buying drinking water for their daily use, residents say.
MCD trucks carrying garbage. Photo: Atul Ashok Howale/The Wire
Apart from the health and environmental concerns to residents from the garbage in the landfills, these sites pose other dangers too. They are sources of methane, a greenhouse gas that warms up the atmosphere. Together, the three landfills have produced at least 124 methane “super emitter” leaks since 2020 as per data quoted by The Guardian from Kayrros, an environmental intelligence agency.
Fire breaking out in these dump sites is a common sight; the most recent was in April last year when a fire broke out in sections of Delhi’s oldest landfill, Ghazipur. Incidentally, the landfill is also the tallest of the three, at 236 feet in height, per a report.
In 2023, the AAP declared ambitious deadlines to clear the waste at all three landfills. Delhi finance minister Kailash Gahlot said in March 2023 that the landfill at Okhla would be cleared by December that year, Bhalswa by March 2024 and Ghazipur by December 2024. However, none of these have materialised.
According to one report, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) pushed the Ghazipur deadline from December 2024 to 2026. In September last year, Times of India reported that the MCD pushed the deadlines again, to 2028, citing the lack of facilities to manage both the legacy waste and fresh waste.
Delhi’s landfills have also become an issue that parties use against each other whenever elections approach, and this time has been no different. On January 26, a portion of garbage at the Bhalswa landfill fell on the nearby houses, near Sharadhanand Colony, injuring two children and damaging several houses.
Delhi Congress President Devender Yadav called out former Delhi Chief Minister and AAP leader Arvind Kejriwal, saying that he had ‘let people down’. A few days later, senior BJP minister Nitin Gadkari promised people at a gathering that if the BJP wins the Delhi elections this year, they would remove garbage from the landfill sites and replace them with gardens and academic institutions within five years.
The AAP in 2022 had claimed that the Congress, which ruled Delhi for 15 years before the AAP came to power, “did nothing” to tackle the landfill sites. On January 30, Swati Maliwal, currently an AAP Rajya Sabha MP who has fallen out with the party, collected garbage from parts of the city in three mini-trucks and shoved some in front of Kejriwal’s residence saying that he had “ensured” that Delhi became a “giant garbage dump”. Following this, Delhi Police detained Maliwal.
‘Unbreathable’ air
Delhi’s deteriorating air quality is another issue that residents say no government is willing to tackle. The Delhi government, with the AAP at the helm for a decade now, has repeatedly been laying the blame on the stubble burning by farmers in adjoining areas including Punjab and Haryana for the capital city’s poor air quality during winters. Indeed, some studies have shown that stubble burning is a major contributor to the high air pollution levels in Delhi during winter.
This winter was no different: Delhi’s air quality in November plummeted to shocking levels. On November 18, 2024, the Air Quality Index (AQI) – as per official figures – dipped to 494. This falls in the “Severe” category, the highest category of air pollution as per the Index which classifies the city’s air quality based on the levels of at least three major pollutants including carbon dioxide.
The Index ranges from 0 to 500, and the higher the AQI, the higher impacts of such air on even healthy people. While an AQI between 0 to 50 is considered ideal, an AQI between 401-500 is categorised as “Severe”, and is the worst air quality level per standards followed by the Central Pollution Control Board.
Also read: Delhi Chokes On A “Severe” AQI of 494; More Restrictions in Place to Curb Pollution
Other AQI websites quoted far higher values in Delhi on the day; as per Swiss agency IQAIR’s world rankings of air quality in cities – based on US AQI calculations – Delhi’s AQI at 8:51 IST on November 18 was 1113, and in the “Hazardous” category as per US standards.
However, data on farm fires revealed a new twist in the story: last winter, farm fires had decreased drastically. As The Wire reported, a detailed analysis by the Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment released on January 6 showed that the annual concentration of fine particulate matter – a major air pollutant – increased by 3.4% in 2024 in Delhi when compared to 2023.
Polluted water supply at Okhla. Photo: Atul Ashok Howale/ The Wire
And alarmingly, this has occurred despite a huge decrease – by a staggering 71.2% – in the counts of stubble fires during the winter of 2024. This clearly points to local and regional sources of pollution, including vehicular emissions, open burning of waste and dust from construction and other sectors causing air pollution in the national capital, the report said.
“I drive an auto-rickshaw daily and travel to different areas in Delhi, but the situation remains the same,” says Ravindra Singh, an auto-rickshaw driver from Uttar Pradesh who has been living in Delhi for several years now.
“There is no change. Along with the polluted air, the dust on the roads and the high volume of vehicles cause a lot of trouble while driving the rickshaw.”
He adds that no government in Delhi seems to be working on the issue of air pollution. “The BJP, Congress, and Aam Aadmi Party all seem to be indulging in freebie politics in Delhi, but none of them are talking about pollution.”
Some are making promises – much like the AAP has over the several years it has been in power in Delhi. Union Minister Nitin Gadkari promised people at a gathering on January 30 that if the BJP wins the elections at Delhi, it would “free” the city of its traffic and air pollution woes in five years, and that the people of Delhi would be able to breathe clean air again.
The frothing Yamuna
But it’s not just polluted air and land that Delhi’s residents have to contend with – there’s polluted water too. The frothing waters of the river Yamuna that flows by the city have consistently been grabbing headlines for years. A literature review of the state of the Yamuna published in 2024 found that 85% of the pollution in the Yamuna stems from “domestic sources”, or human activities, including industrial effluents, raw manure, waste and dead body disposal, idol worship, and contaminants from water used in streams.
Sewage is a huge concern, and studies such as this one show high faecal coliform bacteria levels (due to human fecal waste) in some parts of the river that flows through the city, such as Nizamuddin.
As The Wire reported, the AAP had promised when it came into power a decade ago that it would do whatever it takes to clean the Yamuna, including stopping sewage from draining into the river. But the Yamuna still runs dirty. A study published on February 1 this year found “excessive” values of Biochemical oxygen demand or BOD, which mean that the water is highly polluted and has less oxygen available for aquatic life.
The BOD ranged from 37 to 430 mg/L across 43 points in the Yamuna through the National Capital Region; ideal, unpolluted waters have a BOD of 5 mg/L or less. The study also identified six major pollution hotspots along the river. In mid October last year, stretches of the river in the city were covered in froth: a toxic blanket over the water that contains high levels of ammonia and phosphates and thus poses serious health risks including respiratory and skin problems to people, per The Hindu.
The Yamuna and its pollution has also been a topic of argument between parties in the run up to this year’s elections in the city. While campaigning for the BJP in Delhi, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath asked if Kejriwal would go and take a dip in the Yamuna.
“If as a Chief Minister, my ministers and I can take a dip in the Sangam in Prayagraj, then I want to ask the president of Aam Aadmi Party in Delhi, Arvind Kejriwal, can he go and take a bath in Yamuna with his ministers?” he said.
On January 27, Kejriwal accused the BJP in Haryana of deliberately polluting the waters of the Yamuna. “The Haryana government has mixed poison in the water coming to Delhi from the Yamuna,” he said, claiming that it was only the “vigilance” of Delhi Jal Board engineers that the water was stopped at the border.
The CEO of the Delhi Jal Board, however, refuted these claims. On January 28, Delhi CM Atishi claimed that the toxic ammonia levels in the Yamuna had originated from Haryana, and approached the Election Commission of India regarding this.
Delhi Police had once again detained Rajya Sabha MP Maliwal on February 3 after she staged a protest, along with others, outside Kejriwal’s residence calling out the Delhi government’s “failure to clean the Yamuna”, and saying that the river is “on a ventilator”. Accusing Kejriwal of living in luxury while the river remains polluted, she also challenged him to take a dip in the Yamuna, reported Hindustan Times.
Delhi goes to vote on February 5.