While Delhi govt’s target is to eliminate all mountains of garbage by 2028, MCD is considering diversion of 90,000 metric tonnes of fresh garbage annually from Ghazipur landfill to Okhla.

The landfills in the National Capital will soon become “extinct like the dinosaurs”, Delhi’s environment minister Manjinder Singh Sirsa said Thursday after an inspection of the Okhla landfill. But the Municipal Corporation of Delhi seems to have a different plan—to merely shift waste from one landfill to another.
A senior MCD official said that the agency plans to divert nearly 90,000 metric tonnes of fresh garbage annually from east Delhi’s Ghazipur landfill site to southeast Delhi’s Okhla.
This is being planned because of the space constraints in Ghazipur, one of the largest landfills in the country, and also because the slope of the waste mountain is becoming increasingly unstable. The process of waste transfer is likely to begin ahead of the monsoon season in Delhi.
“There is no fresh waste being dumped at the Okhla landfill site currently. But considering the unstable slopes in Ghazipur, fresh waste might have to be moved to Okhla. The plan, however, would need to be approved,” the official told ThePrint.
The Bharatiya Janata Party leadership at the helm of MCD, however, claims that from Ghazipur to Okhla, all of Delhi’s landfills will disappear by 2028. The Okhla landfill, which officials say has shown the most progress in waste clearance, will be cleared up by 2026, according to Sirsa.
“Our target is to eliminate all the mountains of garbage from Delhi by 2028. After that, these landfills will only remain in photos,” Sirsa told the media during a joint inspection of the Okhla landfill, adding, “Just as dinosaurs became extinct, these landfills are also disappearing from the country.”
Along with Sirsa, the site was inspected by the BJP MP from South Delhi Ramvir Singh Bidhuri and Delhi mayor Raja Iqbal Singh.

Delhi’s legacy waste problem
A report submitted by MCD to the Delhi Pollution Control Committee (DPCC) in 2024 showed that the Capital has around 28 million tonnes of legacy waste spread across three of its landfills—Ghazipur, Okhla and Bhalswa. The report claimed that since 2019, 11.9 million tonnes from this have been cleared.
The report also pointed out that Okhla showed the most progress in waste clearance, with over 5 million tonnes of legacy waste from the total of 6 million tonnes being cleared since 2019. The clearance at Ghazipur has been the slowest, with only about 2.5 million tonnes being cleared in the same time period.
The corporation had been directed to begin the process of biomining the three landfills mentioned above in 2019 by the National Green Tribunal (NGT), which had given strict instructions that the legacy waste dumped needed to be cleared within a year, and a progress report be submitted in six months.
Despite NGT’s instructions, the deadlines have been moved several times since then.
According to experts, if Delhi needs to get rid of its landfills, it will have to implement an effective waste management plan.
“There has to be a systematic waste management plan for Delhi, which should mandatorily include waste segregation. Currently, all of the city’s waste, including recyclable waste, is ending up in the landfills. Unless you stop dumping in these sites, how will you improve anything?” said Bhavreen Kandhari, a Delhi-based environmental activist.

(Edited by Mannat Chugh)

Courtesy: The Print