Maarkhoor
ELITE MEMBER
- Joined
- Aug 24, 2015
- Messages
- 17,051
- Reaction score
- 36
- Country
- Location
Separating waste atop a mound of garbage at a landfill in Delhi last month.CreditSaumya Khandelwal for The New York Times
By Hari Kumar and Kai Schultz
- June 10, 2018
GHAZIPUR, India — Huddled in a stinky, airless room near the center of India’s capital, Rammurti fumed over the 17-story-high mountain of trash half a mile from her home.
The 43-year-old mother, who goes by one name, had watched the garbage in her village of Ghazipur pile higher and higher over the years. It wafted a sickening cocktail of airborne particles that infected her neighbors with tuberculosis and dengue fever, singed trees and turned the ground water a filmy yellow.
But nothing had prepared her for one afternoon last September when a tower of trash broke away from the mass during monsoon rains. It crashed into a nearby canal, which created a surge of sewage that flung motorcyclists into another canal also filled with dirty water.
By the time the police arrived, two people were dead. One of them was Rammurti’s youngest son, 19-year-old Abhishek Gautam.
“The dump killed my son,” she said.
In the metropolitan area of Delhi, which includes the capital New Delhi, trash heaps are towering monuments to India’s growing waste crisis. About 80 billion pounds of trash have accumulated at four official dumping sites, on the fringes of a capital already besieged by polluted air and toxic water, according to the supervisors of the dumps.
The dumps in Delhi and in cities such as Mumbai and Kolkata have become some of the largest, least regulated and most hazardous in the world, said Ranjith Annepu, a co-founder of be Waste Wise, a nonprofit organization that aims to address waste management problems.
Image
Mahipal Singh and Rammurti with their daughter Neha, center, holding a picture of her brother Abhishek, 19, who was killed when Ghazipur landfill collapsed last year.CreditSaumya Khandelwal for The New York Times
“If this continues to happen, the city will drown in its waste,” said Swati Singh Sambyal, a program manager at the Center for Science and Environment in New Delhi.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/10/world/asia/india-delhi-garbage.html
