In October I had a speaking session in Sarita Vihar and took the Gurgaon-Faridabad Pahadi road that connects to Delhi near the Manav Rachna University. I didn’t notice anything very different on the road that we have cycled several times during 2009-10. I fondly recollected our first ride with the PedalYatri group to Mangar and then the cycling competition that we held in that area. How upset we were to find motorbikes riding in “our” area and then of course ride through the “grand canyon” created by illegal mining. This whole area has too many special memories from ten years back !
Things have moved on, the pace of “development” is breathless and we have stopped being the serious cyclists we once were… cycling seems jinxed, but anyway, thats not the topic of this blog.
After my session, I returned the same way and suddenly near a curve I found a lot of kites circling and a small mountain came into view. I started clicking pictures and it dawned on me that this is a garbage mountain. In just 8 to 9 years, we have managed to create a tall garbage mountain ?*&$%.
I know long back we had named a particular chowk (four road crossing) as “Kachra” chowk, and there is a landfill there too which became a mountain before civic authorities and NGOs got into the act and stopped using it. I don’t know if the garbage there has been all sorted and processed or whether it has just been compacted and left there, never to decay because most of it is non-biodegradable plastic. I think this is the new landfill that got created in place of the Kachra chowk one.
But these man made garbage mountains are all over Delhi. This is what we get for electing idiots into the government ! The Yugpurush CM of Delhi has literally let Delhi go to the dogs – it looks exactly like the inside of his head, “messed up”.
The following pictures are from Okhla and just a couple of days back. We were going for a meeting with one of ShikshaDaan’s sponsors and we got delayed because everywhere the subways were flooded. After turning back from all sides, we entered Okhla and then made our way towards Jasola.
If this is the capital city of our country I shudder to think what’s happening elsewhere. The environment minister Mr. Javadekar has to give up his tea and smell strong coffee instead. You can have political differences with the CM of Delhi but you better fix the garbage disposal system because its harming Indians.
I have similar pictures of overflowing landfills from Chennai and Hyderabad. I will post them too but is anything being done at all about waste segregation at source? I know Indore has done an outstanding job of waste segregation and I found this article very revealing – Small cities win big on waste management. We need a nationwide focus on waste management as the next big Swachh Bharat project.
#wastemanagement #SwachhBharat #GarbageMountains