“The poisonous smell has made our lives hell. Residents say the dump often makes breathing virtually impossible. “It all needs to be stopped as the continuous dumping has severely polluted the air and ground water,” said Chitra Mukherjee, head of Chintan, an environment advocacy group.

Leachate, a black toxic liquid, oozes from the dump into a local canal.

Shambhavi Shukla, senior researcher at the Center for Science and Environment in New Delhi, said methane belching from the garbage can become even more deadly when mixed with atmosphere. Dumping was banned after the deaths, but the measure lasted only a few days because authorities could not find an alternative.įires, sparked by methane gas coming from the dump, regularly break out and take days to extinguish. In 2018, a section of the hill collapsed in heavy rains killing two people. “About 2,000 tonnes of garbage is dumped at Ghazipur each day,” a Delhi municipal official said on condition of anonymity. But the city’s detritus has kept on arriving each day in hundreds of trucks.Īlso read: EDMC struggling to reduce garbage burden at Ghazipur landfill Ghazipur was opened in 1984 and reached its capacity in 2002 when it should have been closed. India’s Supreme Court warned last year that red warning lights will soon have to be put on the dump to alert passing jets. Taking up the area of more than 40 football pitches, Ghazipur rises by nearly 10 metres a year with no end in sight to its foul-smelling growth.Īccording to East Delhi’s superintendent engineer Arun Kumar, it is already more than 65 metres (213 feet) high.Īt its current rate of growth, it will be taller than the iconic Taj in Agra, some 73 metres high, in 2020. Hawks and other birds of prey hover around the towering Ghazipur landfill on the eastern fringe of New Delhi, stray cows, dogs and rats wander at will over the huge expanse of smoking filth. India’s tallest rubbish mountain in New Delhi is on course to rise higher than the Taj Mahal in the next year, becoming a fetid symbol for what the UN considers the world’s most polluted capital.

Midico waste