20/12/2025
Get • Abhishek Singh-India
Ghazipur Garbage Hill
A mountain of sorts stands at the eastern end of Delhi.
Go any nearer and the ambient stench turns into a bitter realization: the mountain is but one giant heap of garbage dumped at the site called Ghazipur Dumping Yard.
Other than being a feasting ground for scores of birds and stray animals, the yard is also a source of informal employment for hundreds of scavengers who have come to settle at the base of the landfill to make a living out of the trash.
For reasons unknown, the rag pickers at Ghazipur happen to be overwhelmingly women and kids, thus outnumbering the men in the workforce. However, it is, as usual, the animals who bear the cost of mankind’s crap the most for being incognizant of the hazard they end up eating out of the endless piles of trash which is littered all over the site.
I first visited the yard in 2017 and over the years as I frequented it, awed and touched by the human factor, on a more positive note, I also got to witness the series of initiatives which are being undertaken to recycle the disproportionate amounts of waste the city is producing on a daily basis.
And in what appears to be signs of change, the dumping yard - once slated to get taller than even the Qutub Minar - has been coming down now.
The sights of garbage-burning have been replaced by giant machines put in place by the local municipal corporation as part of a bio-mining and bio- remediation project to redeem the yard.
About 20 backhoes and excavators and 15 waste separators and sieves (trammels) plying across 5 such segregation sites are working throughout the day at the yard now as opposed to nothing back in 2017 during my first visit….
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