Scavengers at an informal garbage dump in Shahdara, a suburb of Delhi. — Filepic/©2025 The New York Times Company
FOR years, trucks have hauled loads of hot, acrid ash from Delhi’s waste-to-energy plant, dumping it dangerously close to schools and homes.
Residents in the surrounding neighbourhoods endure stinging eyes, hacking coughs and a grim reality: blackened air and poisoned soil.
The plant, once heralded as a green energy marvel, was meant to tackle the Indian capital’s soaring landfills – putrid trash mountains 60m high. These rubbish heaps span 60ha, collectively weighing 16 million tonnes, dwarfing the city’s skyline and occasionally collapsing in deadly avalanches.
The government’s solution was ambitious: burn trash to generate electricity.
Yet, tests have shown the plant spews toxic chemicals into the air and dumps hazardous ash into residential areas, affecting up to one million people.
“I am the living example,” said Shailendra Bhadoriya, a cardiologist who moved into a leafy neighbourhood in 2011.
He loved its proximity to good schools and parks for his young children, and wanted to be able to walk to work at the Fortis Escorts Heart Institute, one of the largest cardiac hospitals in Asia, where he directed the intensive care unit.
He described watching the waste-to-energy plant being built about 150m from his home.
Then, soon after it opened in 2012, Bhadoriya said, he noticed something worrisome: he and his family were constantly sick. His neighbours started to complain, too.
A file photo of a man scavenging at the towering Bhalswa Landfill in a suburb of Delhi, on Feb 25, 2023. — ©2025 The New York Times Company
Green promise goes sour
In one of the most unequal cities in the world, the problems stalk the wealthy and poor alike.
The facility, named the Timarpur-Okhla Waste to Energy Plant, is run by one of India’s largest business conglomerates. It sits squarely in the centre of the capital and burns as much as 3,000 tonnes of garbage a day, generating a small amount of electricity for a power-starved country.
Residents call it a “toxic monster”.
The Ghazipur Landfill, a mountain of trash over 60m tall, next to Mulla Colony, a Delhi suburb, on Feb 25, 2023. — Filepic/©2025 The New York Times Company
Independent tests commissioned by The New York Times revealed alarmingly high levels of heavy metals and dioxins in the air and soil around the plant, exceeding safety standards by significant margins.
Dioxins – found in the Vietnam War-era Agent Orange – are linked to severe health issues.
Former plant manager Rakesh Kumar Aggarwal admitted to cutting safety corners.
“On paper, it looks fine,” he said before his death in 2020. “But it’s killing people.”
Poisonous by-products
The ash dumped near homes has turned once-thriving neighbourhoods into a bleak landscape.
In Tajpur Pahari, ash-laden soil samples revealed cadmium levels eight times above US hazard limits, while lead contamination was widespread.
“The dust is like a bedsheet,” said Rohit Mishra, 19, wiping down his desk and schoolbooks as plumes of soot swirled in the air of his home. “It coats everything.”
His mother sweeps and sweeps again – a Groundhog Day of dirt and grime.
Still, the family is plagued by hacking coughs of black phlegm, the colour of their lives since the trucks started coming.
There is so much ash that the government has even levelled it, with a school, a clinic, a wedding hall and a park built atop the poisonous ground.
Incongruously, one of the dump sites is in an “eco park”.
Mishra’s family suffers from persistent respiratory issues, a common complaint in the area.
Children aren’t spared. Varna Sri Raman’s 11-year-old son developed severe bronchitis after the family moved to Sukhdev Vihar, just 90m from the plant.
“It’s choking us every day,” said Sri Raman.
A global controversy
When the plant opened, the government promised an innovative solution to a seemingly intractable problem.
Delhi’s trash mountains and landfills are so enormous that they spanned more than 60ha last year, with waste weighing about 16 million tonnes.
The solution brought together some of India’s most powerful players across business and politics. The Indian government partnered with a company controlled by the Jindal family, one of the nation’s most prominent.
The arrangement was fairly straightforward: the company that runs the plant received land and the promise of a US$2mil government grant to help build the facility. Delhi’s municipal government supplies the plant with garbage to burn, and then the electricity gets sold back to the capital’s grid.
The plant, certified by the United Nations in 2011, sold carbon credits for its supposed environmental benefits.
Yet, regulators discovered emissions up to 10 times above permissible limits.
Even so, the government plans to expand the facility and build similar plants nationwide.
Critics argue that Delhi’s government prioritises aesthetics over health, focusing on clearing its infamous trash mountains while ignoring the toll on human lives.
The government has silenced protests and ignored pleas for stricter enforcement.
The price of pollution
Delhi’s first engineered dump site, opened this year, offers safer waste management options, but the damage from years of toxic dumping lingers.
Residents like Sri Raman feel trapped, unable to move without losing their life savings.
Sri Raman’s neighbourhood is mixed, Muslim and Hindu, and the government’s Hindu-nationalist agenda has often pitted religious groups against each other across India.
This makes it harder for people to join together to stop the pollution, Sri Raman and other residents say.
“The state that this country is in right now, it’s impossible to get Hindus to join with Muslims to fight,” Sri Raman said. “But the pollution doesn’t affect me any different than a Muslim mother.”
“We both need to protect our families, to live,” she said. — ©2025 The New York Times Company
