The tallest mountain in Hyderabad is no longer Golconda or the KBR Park Ridge. The garbage dump at Jawaharnagar towers over them by many metres, thanks to the effort of the citizens of Hyderabad and the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC). Where the Golconda Fort rises to a height at 608 metres above the sea level (MSL), the Jawaharnagar trash dump towers over it at 614 MSL.
“The mountain is becoming higher and higher,” says Ramesh, a former HCL employee, who lives about a kilometre away from the Jawaharnagar dumpyard and sees it everyday when he steps out of his home. “The trash is stirred using earthmovers on Tuesdays and Thursdays and when the wind flows over it, we have to rush inside as the smell is overpowering,” says Ramesh, who has grown up in the area and remembers swimming and drinking the water of Dammaiguda lake. “Now, we are totally dependent on piped water. Borewell water is used only in toilets and for washing clothes. If we bathe with it, it triggers an allergic reaction,” he says.
When T. Chandrasekhar bought his apartment at VRR Gayatri Enclave on the fringes of Nagaram Arogya Vanam in 2019, he was delighted. It overlooked a vast spread of greenery and a brown mountain framed against it. “I am planning to move out. It has become difficult with the smell. I bought the house for ₹30 lakh, including the woodwork. Now, the going price is ₹38 lakh,” says Mr. Chandrasekhar who works with an IT major.
While the toxic blaze at Kochi dumpyard is in the spotlight, Hyderabad’s trash dump has been partially capped ending a series of incidents where people lost lives either due to raging fires or burial under the trash.
Shifting the problem
How this mountain of trash began growing in the once rocky forested area is the story of shifting the problem from one area to the other in a boomtown with limitless access to plastic, electrical waste and domestic trash. Before 2005, the waste generated by the erstwhile Municipal Corporation of Hyderabad used to be dumped at the 47-acre Autonagar dumpyard. Then, the civic body turned to an area lying in the grey zone of Secunderabad Cantonment and Jawaharnagar Panchayat.
“The Autonagar site used composting to treat the waste but the smell was overpowering in the surrounding areas. The quantum of plastic waste also started rising making composting complicated. Then the court ordered the site to be moved, and that’s when the municipal waste began to be dumped at Jawaharnagar,” says Anant Maringanti of Hyderabad Urban Labs, who has tracked growth of human habitations in the area.
Between 2000 and February 2012, the GHMC pegged the quantum of accumulated untreated waste at 120 lakh metric tonnes. Or 12,00,00,00,000 kilos of waste.
“The time for a dumpster to go up and come down is about 15 minutes. There is rarely any waiting time. The vehicles move throughout the day and night. Even on festive days, the drivers of the dumpsters have to keep working,” says a supervisor of the company that has been tasked with managing the trash. He estimates the number of dumpsters carrying 10 tonnes and 15 tonnes of waste at 500 to 600 in a 24-hour cycle.
“I cannot count them. There must be hundreds everyday. They go all through the day and night,” says a coconut vendor near Malkaram where many of the men driving the massive earthmovers stop by occasionally.
Legacy leachate
The GHMC calls it legacy leachate. But, for the residents of Rajiv Gruha Kalpa Colony at Ahmedguda, which skirts one section of the pond, it has meant mass evacuation. “Our family is the only one here. Everyone has left. Nobody wants to stay here even if the rent is a few hundred rupees,” says Parvati, whose family occupies the ground floor of Block 133. Out of the 16 houses, only one house is occupied because of the smell and skin allergies. The abandoned houses have phone numbers scrawled on the doors for those interested in renting them.
Leachate is the liquid that filters through waste and carries with it products of decomposition, chemicals and other materials in solid waste. The leached chemicals are acidic in nature. Leachates from solid waste sites slowly seep through the layers of soil beneath and contaminate the ground water sources. In Hyderabad, where heavy seasonal rainfall is the norm, the leachate doesn’t stay within the constructed ponds but runs off into streams and lakes that are downstream poisoning the area triggering an alarm and calls for action.
A 2021 study published in Applied NanoBioScience showed that the borewell water within the dumpyard and buffer zone had total dissolved solids at 3,956 mg/l while the norm is 500 mg/l, total hardness as calcium carbonate at 2,398 mg/l while the norm is 300 mg/l. Toxic lead was found at .26 mg/l while the upper limit, according to the Bureau of Indian Standards, is .05 mg/l. This off the charts toxicity in borewell water shows the role of contamination of groundwater due to leachate from the landfill.
Stirring a mountain
On the eastern side of the dumpyard, the odour brings in swarms of large houseflies, on the northern side where the leachate ponds are located, there is corrosive sulphurous smell and on the western side, a foul smell of rotting organic waste predominates. As earthmovers stir the landfill on the eastern side, pigeons, cranes and starlings wheel around in circles looking for food.
Under the tarp of the capping project, lies the problem. The GHMC lost an appeal in the Supreme Court for persisting with the capping project. The SC instead wanted bio-mining and bio-remediation of the dumpsite, as per the National Green Tribunal order. The NGT order cuts through the fog of ‘scientific capping’ verbiage: “…it is imperative to do bio-mining and bio-remediation in the interest of environment and to save valuable scarce public resource in the form of land. The land can be used for setting up integrated waste processing facilities and developing green belt or bio-diversity park. If the State/Corporation does not have funds, the State may consider monetising a part of the land to raise revenue for the purpose, after following the due process of law. In any case, capping cannot be permitted.”
The NGT order came in 2020, the SC order for bio-mining and bio-remediation was delivered on January 31, 2022. The GHMC floated a Request for Proposal to dispose the legacy waste through bio-mining and bio-remediation in March 2022. This won’t be the first time in the country that this method is being used to deal with a legacy issue.
The Mumbai Gorai dumpyard land was similarly reclaimed, and Nagar Nigam Indore dealt with the issue in three years’ time. Albeit, Indore had to deal with 12 lakh tonnes of waste, Hyderabad has to deal with 120 lakh tonnes.
A 40% surge in 2 years
In 2020, the GHMC was dumping between 5,500-6,000 metric tonnes of Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) at the site. Two years later, the civic body estimated that it has to process 7,000 metric tonnes per day. A 40% increase in garbage in just two years. This does not include the garbage that GHMC workers burn everyday at various locations in the city. It also does not include the waste generated by restaurants, slaughter houses and meat shops, which dump them in various locations of Musi river in the night and at other locations.
The GHMC has capped the per kg collection cost for bulk generators of waste (above 100 kg) at ₹2.90 if collected at source and ₹1.16 if transported to Jawaharnagar facility. In contrast, the black market of trash dumping is cheap. “I pay ₹1,500 per month. Every afternoon and evening, the tipper auto comes and collects the waste. I don’t know what he does with it,” says Nawaz, a chicken shop owner at First Lancers.
If 7,000 metric tonnes of waste are being dumped at the site everyday, why is there domestic waste littering the streets? “We pay ₹14,000 per month for collecting garbage from our apartment complex which has 90 houses. He comes every alternate day. He dumps everything in the van but separates what he can sell and fills a bag with it,” says a resident of an apartment complex at Nalanda Nagar.
According to a 2018 World Bank study, the Hyderabad civic body collects 89% of the trash generated. The collected trash is moved to Jiyaguda transfer station. The new road that passes by the Jiyaguda transfer station is up there in olfactory terror as motorists pinch there noses while passing the stretch.
Behind the Golconda Fort, visitors to the heritage site see the trash compactor collecting waste from the surrounding areas. The workers scream and shout as the garbage is pushed and compacted in the vehicle.
At Patny Junction, all the four corners have three bins. Red for hazardous waste, green for organic waste, and blue for dry and recyclable waste. Unfortunately, the vehicles in which the trash is collected has no partition. It is like a show for the photo-op of Swachh Bharat Mission, which has its annual survey in the first month of the year.
Now, the GHMC is set to create another landfill in 152 acres at Pyaranagar village in Sangareddy district about 50 km from the city with a road cutting through Nallavelly Reserve Forest.
Will the GHMC wake up and deal with the real issue or resort to gestures of show without confronting the pile of garbage? Will it keep shifting trash heaps blighting the landscape of the State in multiple locations? That’s the million dollar question for citizens.
CHRONOLOGY
2000: Municipalities in the surrounding areas begin dumping waste in areas known as Irla Gutta, Koyya Gutta and Malkaram
2005: Autonagar municipal waste site closed
2007: Municipalities surrounding Hyderabad merged to form the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation
2008: GHMC formulates an Integrated Municipal Solid Waste Management project
2009: Ramky Enviro Engineers Ltd
2020: National Green Tribunal orders bio-mining and bio-remediation of the landfill
2022: Supreme Court upholds NGT order on bio-mining and bio-remediation
2022: GHMC asks HiMSW to begin work on alternative landfill with a power plant at Pyaranagar in Sangareddy district
