Chintan, an NGO that works in waste management, called for an immediate rollback of the permission granted to the East Delhi Municipal Corporation to set up its landfill site at Gonda Gujran on Thursday.
The site, which the NGO says is 2.5 km from the Yamuna river line, places the land under the category of active floodplain areas or the “O Zone”.
Floodplains are the area on the banks of a river into which water overflows during flood or high water discharge. In a statement, the NGO has termed the decision as “the end of the terminally ill river Yamuna as a living entity”.
The move by the Delhi Development Authority to allot the site has ignored various laws in place to ensure environment protection and is in contravention to previous NGT judgments, which call for penalties for disposing garbage in the river zone and its drains, Chintan also said.
Suggestions
The NGO also argued that instead, mandatory composting and biomethanation must be enforced and localised suggestions should be laid out for the improvement of garbage management such as ward-wise material recovery facilities, recycling of dry waste, a citywide waste reduction policy, and others.
