Dadu Majra dump: Come out with solutions, contract, High Court tells Chandigarh civic body

Chandigarh, November 15

The Punjab and Haryana High Court today directed the Municipal Corporation here to present before the Bench the proposed solutions and the contract awarded for clearing the Dadu Majra garbage dump.

As a petition filed in public interest on the Dadu Majra dump came up for resumed hearing, the Division Bench of Acting Chief Justice Ritu Bahri and Justice Nidhi Gupta asked the MC counsel to demonstrate to the court how the problem could be resolved. Directions were also issued to the MC to come out with the contract and explain how it would clear the mountains of garbage. The Bench made it clear that the issue was not required to linger on when technologies were available to resolve it.

The case pertains to a PIL on the garbage dump filed by advocate Amit Sharma in 2021, which was merged with the 2016 petition of Dadu Majra resident Dipti, represented by advocate Ranjan Lakhanpal.

In July, Sharma had filed a perjury application against the Municipal Corporation in response to its latest in a series of action taken reports. He accused the MC of presenting false information to the court. Among other things, it was claimed there was a wall around the dump at a time when a significant portion had collapsed within a year of being built, and leachate was flowing on to the roads.

The MC counsel, during the course of hearing, countered the allegation by asserting that their work was progressing as planned, and they had signed a new contract. The MC claimed that one of the three dumps at Dadu Majra had been cleared, which Sharma refuted by saying that legacy waste had merely been covered by a layer of soil, but leachate continued to flow.

Sharma alleged that despite claims of progress, the waste crisis had intensified, with the number of garbage dumps rising from one to three from 2021 to 2023. The processing of waste had fallen from 13 per cent in 2020 to less than 10 per cent in 2022, while hundreds of crores of taxpayers’ money was being spent on new contracts.

Citing successful waste management models, Sharma referred to Indore’s rapid resolution of its garbage mountain within six months at a fraction of the cost. NITTTR in Chandigarh, he told the court, had also proposed a cost-effective solution.