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As he made his way through the winding alleys around the enormous piles of garbage, Rajesh Prajapati showed the countless ways that the waste pickers could pass to the magnificent mountains at the edge of the slums that give color to all life.
“It looks like a mountain,” said a local doctor. “But it’s not a proper mountain, it’s a mountain of rubbish, made of plastic and paper bags and lots of rubbish from all over Mumbai.”
The mountain is a source of suffering for the residents of the area because of the many health hazards associated with breathing fumes from the decaying waste, but it is also a major source of income.
Jahana Shaikh, 45, and her two teenage children, Reshma, 13, and Sohail, 12, were part of a group of scavengers sorting through piles of plastic and pieces of wire and other metal they had retrieved from the mountain, which they were about to do. later try to sell it.
“How much we make depends on whether we have the same. But it’s just barely enough to get by,” he told CBC News in Hindi. “If we don’t go to the landfill for a day, there will be no food at home.”
Deonar, located east of Mumbai, is one of the largest and oldest landfills in India – entrenched for nearly a century. It is not just one mountain but eight different massive mounds, combined.
The size of the landfill is incomprehensible to the uninitiated: about 18 floors, with more than 16 million tons of waste, spread over 121 hectares – roughly the size of 227 football fields.
The colossal dump has a dead wall, with barbed wire above the perimeter, because public access is prohibited, but people ask anyway, darting through countless tunnels and holes in the concrete wall.
Dr. Prajapati, a doctor who works near Deonar, stood watching three men whip through a coordinated process of sorting recyclable materials outside one of the tunnels, as he spoke to the CBC.
The pickers will sell later to small businesses that collect waste, the doctor explained, after what is saved is transferred to local scrapyards and other stores. It is an entire ecosystem that supports the livelihood of about 100,000 people in the Deonar waste mountains. But it comes at a cost.
“All plastic waste, no gloves, no masks,” said Prajapati, 35, sadly. “Of course it will affect your lungs. But to get their bread and butter, they do it.”
Festering waste releases toxic fumes
In the five years he has been stationed in the neighborhood near the Deonar dump, Prajapati has seen many alarming cases of tuberculosis and other respiratory diseases, often in the final stages because residents consider chronic coughs or wheezing to be nothing to worry about.
“We can smell the smoke, of course, we can’t breathe properly either because of it [it]” he said, when asked to describe life in Deonar, with plastic everywhere.
Decomposing waste releases toxic gases such as methane, hydrogen sulfide and carbon monoxide.
WATCH | Garbage mounds in Mumbai bring jobs and health hazards:
Thousands of people living near India’s largest garbage dump in Mumbai depend on burning garbage for their livelihood, but suffer health problems as a result. Although the government promised to get rid of landfills, there are still many.
Jahana Shaikh and her family know the dangers, working on the front lines of the informal waste economy. Three of his six children died suddenly, he said, including the eldest daughter of tuberculosis four years ago, at 16. Shaikh’s five-month-old son died of pneumonia, while another baby girl died of unknown causes.
Jahana blamed her death on the pollution she lived in and breathed.
They try not to send their remaining children to the actual mountains of garbage to look for treasure, preferring to sort and sell the plastic, but there is not much choice when they live steps from a giant landfill.
“What other work can we do?” Shaikh said softly, with a laugh.
‘Daily danger’
Rates of tuberculosis and other diseases are higher in these areas, made worse by cramped housing, according to waste management and planning experts.
“You live with garbage as a daily thing, it’s a daily danger,” said Amita Bhide, a professor with the Center for Urban Policy and Governance, at the Mumbai-based Tata Institute of Social Sciences.
“This is the ward [which has] the highest proportion of tuberculosis and multidrug-resistant tuberculosis. The proportion of urinary tract infections is very high among women. There are several skin diseases that you can see,” Bhide added.
The professor noted that there is also new evidence of an increase in respiratory distress near Deonar, after a bio-medical waste incinerator was installed in the area.
While the size of Mumbai’s well-known dump site is slightly different, health problems are plaguing the neighborhood around the country’s garbage mountains.
According to a 2020 report compiled by the Delhi-based Center for Science and Environment (CSE), India has 3,159 landfills storing around 800 million tonnes of waste.
An update recently released this year concluded that out of 3,184 waste mountains in the country, 234 have been reclaimed and cleaned. Another eight are classified as scientific landfills, meaning no more waste is dumped and leaks or emissions are checked by accredited laboratories to ensure the site is not becoming toxic.
The hundreds of landfills that remain continue to devastate, periodically catching fire and burning for days. These fires are often caused by combustible gases escaping from decaying waste, which, if burned, release more smoke into the air.
The most recent example was in the southern Indian city of Kochi, in Kerala in early March. Toxic smoke billowed into the air for about two weeks as the fire raged, blanketing the city in a thick haze and forcing schools to close and advise wearing N95 masks.
Successive governments have tried to address the problem of waste management, including the current prime minister of India. Narendra Modi, who published a cleanliness plan in October 2021 that included a promise that “the mountains of garbage in the city will be processed and completely eliminated”. The idea is to turn it into a garbage factory.
A goal that is beyond complex for many experts, who are skeptical.
Bhide called it a “very important statement” that showed “the political will to make some changes” while also downplaying the thought that the waste of decades of legacy could be thrown away so easily.
“We are slow,” the professor said, comparing the changes in a country like India to “moving a mammoth elephant. [with] many parts that do not always move harmoniously”.
Not a single city in India has succeeded in implementing all the requirements set out in a set of waste management rules enacted more than 20 years ago in 2002, he said.
Deonar is also the focus of a 27-year-old court case aimed at closing the landfill.
“The closure order of Deonar Landfill has been given more than 10 years ago and still it has not succeeded,” said Bhide.
So, more and more garbage is dumped in Mumbai’s landfills, and people like Shaikh and his family members climb through the cracks in the walls every day to get to the garbage on the mountain.
It is the only option, said Shaikh.
“Otherwise, we’ll starve.”
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