Gurugram: Residents protest proposed dumping site along Dwarka E-way

Sumedha Sharma

Gurugram, July 7

Gurugram residents staged a protest following the Municipal Corporation’s announcement that it would set up a new waste management site along the Dwarka Expressway.

Sanitation Panel to be set up

• Haryana Chief Secretary TVSN Prasad, who was in Gurugram on Sunday, said the state govt was committed to ensuring cleanliness & a strong drainage in the city.
• Prasad, along with the deputy commissioner of Gurugram, visited various sites prone to improper garbage disposal. He ordered the local authorities to increase the number of vehicles for door-to-door garbage collection.
• He further issued orders for the formation of a three-member committee, which will set standards for sanitation vehicles to collect garbage from the doorstep.

Struggling to get rid of the garbage mounds at the Bandhwari landfill, the Gurugram MC had doubled up efforts to process legacy waste. Now, it has announced that a new garbage dumping site would be set up at Daultabad village along the expressway to process fresh waste.

The civic body officials said 1,200 metric tonnes of waste coming to Bandhwari would be diverted here and processed on a daily basis.

Villagers, who had begun the protest three days ago, were joined by over a thousand condominium owners, investors and local farmers. Environmentalists have also highlighted the proximity of the chosen site to the Najafgarh eco-fragile zone.

“We will not pay for their mistake with our and our children’s lives. They have ruined Bandhwari and areas around Gwal Pahari. We cannot let them do the same in societies near the Dwarka Expressway,” said the Dwarka Expressway Gurugram Development Association, which spearheaded the protest.

“Our land prices have hiked owing to expressway and soon we expect our fate to change soon with new opportunities and the MC wants to dump garbage here,” said Daultabad’s Sunny.

Meanwhile, the Gurugram MC maintains that an alternate site had to be chosen for dumping fresh waste, which could be used till the Bandhwari landfill was cleared.

MC Commissioner Narhari Singh Banger said, “There will be no mound of garbage here as it will be a processing unit. The waste brought here will be treated and processed daily. The city has to be united on this if we want our waste management crisis to be resolved.”