Delhi’s stinky, unhygienic, infamous landmarks — the three landfill sites — could soon be gone. The entire inert waste gathered at the three landfill sites in the National Capital will be used for road construction.
Union Minister for Road Transport & Highways Nitin Gadkari on Wednesday issued directions to the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) in this regard following his meeting with Delhi Lieutenant Governor Vinai Kumar Saxena.
The Minister also decided to provide Delhi with `700 crore from the Central Road Fund for construction, repair, maintenance and beautification of roads in the National Capital. The NHAI had earlier committed to using 20 lakh tonnes of the waste for road construction.
The garbage mounds had been a major issue in the recent MCD elections and the ruling BJP lost the elections after a 15-year rule.
According to sources, the Delhi Lieutenant Governor met Gadkari and urged to provide `700 crore under the Central Road Fund for construction, repair, maintenance and beautification of roads in Delhi.
The meeting, which was called for resolution of issues pertaining to NHAI projects like Urban Extension Road-II, Dwarka Expressway, Delhi-Dehradun Highway and parallel flyover at Vasant Kunj Sector C-D, had senior officials from both sides headed by Union Minister Gadkari and LG Saxena.
The NHAI had signed an agreement with the East Delhi Municipal Corporation (EDMC) in November 2016, it estimated, for the year 2018, a cumulative cost of `349 crore (inflation costs added) to use the then entire garbage volume at Ghazipur-13 million metric tonnes.
In 2017, the NHAI had floated a tender for “lifting and segregation” of the Ghazipur landfill trash, to fill up the 96-km-long Delhi-Meerut Expressway. But the garbage was used only for construction of two kilometres of roads. The NHAI refused to lift the landfill trash due to financial viability.
Delhi has three sanitary landfill sites located at Ghazipur, Okhla, and Bhalswa. Earlier, a piece of land in South Delhi’s Tehkhand area has been allocated to the MCD for an engineering landfill site and the project is expected to be completed by April 2023. This proposed “engineering landfill site” will be the city’s first such site. The current three landfill sites in Delhi are spread over an area of 202 acres in total.
According to sources, it was informed in the meeting that the hitherto pending issues with regards to the above mentioned, like tree cutting / translocation permissions, allotment of land, handing over of possession of allotted land, removal of garbage collection point, shifting of power transmission line on part of Delhi Government / DDA / MCD had already been completed. These issues, pending for long, had been sorted with active steering by the L-G over the last few months, the last being clearing proposals for tree translocation, which was done on December 19. This has cleared the bottlenecks in implementation of the critical NHAI projects.
BJP MP from East Delhi Gautam Gambhir on Wednesday said that reduction of height of the Ghazipur landfill has been his priority from day one, and claimed that in three years the massive dump will be “decimated totally”. A statement issued by his office said that biomining of the legay waste is being carried out using a trommel machine since October 2019. It claimed that 18-20 metre of the landfill’s height has been reduced at different stretches from the top.
