New Delhi's trash towers: Why India's capital is drowning in its garbage

Here is how Delhi's 'solution' to its waste management challenge four decades ago snowballed into a full-blown crisis as we ignored common sense. And if we don't wake up even now, it will be a catastrophe.

In the early 1980s, Delhi had a challenge. Heaps of rotting and stinking rubbish littered its lanes and streets. Under the pressure of a population boom, the city needed a vast tract of land to dispose of its daily discard. Authorities finally settled for a site in East Delhi in 1984.

A decade later, markets opened up, and consumerism took root, changing our lifestyles and consumption patterns. More cash in hand made us feel powerful and disregard the old-world wisdom of waste segregation, recycling, reuse, and composting.

Our behaviour was defined by use and throw. We bought more and more packaged material, including food and juices, and used single-use polybags rampantly.

To accommodate this new waste, another site was chosen in Northwest Delhi's Bhalswa. Two years later, in 1996, when more homes, hotels, restaurants, and offices were built, a third landfill site became operational in South Delhi's Okhla.

Dictionaries define landfill as the process of getting rid of large amounts of rubbish by burying it or a place where rubbish is buried. By definition, it's a process by which something goes in and not the other way around. You fill the land and the air.