Even a week after the fire in the Brahmapuram landfill in Kochi, Kerala’s most populous metropolis, smoke is still billowing from the trash mountain, which was supposed to fuel a waste-to-energy power plant that is still in the works. 

Questions have been vocally raised about the handling and treatment of solid waste in this rapidly-expanding city, in an environmentally-conscious state, as well as the delay in the construction of the waste-to-energy plant. 

Very little thought, however, seems to have been given to the more pinching issues at hand: rapidly expanding Indian cities, commensurate with its economic rise, but without concrete strategies or sustainable socio-physical infrastructure to handle the contingencies arising from perennial migration, population growth, swelling numbers of vertically-rising habitats along with the resultant urban waste, uncontrolled surge of vehicular population and their pollution imprints, to name a few. 

Kochi as metropolis: going the Delhi way

The Brahmapuram solid waste treatment facility and its adjunct dumping area, reportedly spread over 100 acres of municipal land in Kochi’s suburbs, only happens to be one of the over 3000 landfills or urban trash dumping grounds spread across the country, also home to the world’s largest population.  

Kochi, which had a population of over 6 lakhs in 2018, as per some estimates, has grown to close to 20 lakhs in 2022 matching the city’s rapidly expanding commercial landscape and inclusion of adjoining municipalities like Thrikkakara, Thripunithura, Kalamassery, Eloor, Maradu, and Aluva into the metropolitan area. The Brahmapuram treatment plant and landfill were supposed to absorb this expansive effluent mass. 

Considering that environment- and hygiene-conscious Keralites, particularly those in the urban centres, have always been resistant to dumping grounds in their suburbs and mofussil fringes, the Brahmapuram project seems to have gained public legitimacy supposedly because a waste-to-energy plant, costing over 350 crores, was also to come up at the site and gobble up all the solid waste.

While a robust system is claimed to be in place under the local self-governing bodies to handle the biodegradable waste following their effective segregation, it was assumed that the waste-to-energy plant will optimally use the solid waste to generate power besides the refuse-derived fuel.

Well-intentioned plans though need not always lead to effective implementation on the ground. While the waste-to-energy plant seems nowhere in sight and may not be expected be operational in the next two years, at least, it is also reported that only a small amount of the collected waste has been effectively treated at the treatment facility. As a result, new waste, arriving daily in hundreds of tonnes, has supposedly been heaped over the legacy waste. 

It is only a matter of time before a dump heap turns into a trash mountain, as illustrated in the landfills of Ghazipur, Bhalswa and Okhla that have become eyesores for the National Capital Region, with gaseous explosions and major fire outbreaks witnessed many times in recent years.  

If Brahmapuram is a repetition of the landfill perils witnessed in the NCR, this also happens to be the story around every major Indian city and metropolis where urban refuse, litter and sewage happens to be a daily problem that city planners and administrators overlook or sidestep in the absence of visionary strategies.  

Tinted-glass cities unable to handle their refuse

The transformation from a socialist development model to a market-oriented system entailed that profit, more than social responsibility, could define the planning and execution principles for urban development projects. Hence, we are witness to Indian cities being bombarded by housing condominiums and commercial megastructures with gay abandon and little consideration imparted to the local ecology, groundwater conditions or other environmental factors. Neither does any of the cities seem to be backed by robust and sustainable waste management infrastructure. 

Renewability and recyclability, in fact, are not virtues that Indians have accustomed themselves to. The imperative of segregating biodegradable waste from solid ones at their home or kitchen source is a culture that is still confined to posh and elite urban cultures. One only needs to venture out to the small towns across the country or even the satellite towns around the national capital region to get a feel of how segregation essentially remains a scavenging activity physically done by low-paid labourers linked to the local dumps.   

The trash mountains towering over three prime locations in Delhi are a testament enough to how municipal authorities in India struggle with the quantum of urban waste and how tangible waste treatment methods and waste-to-energy projects are yet to make a radical impact in India’s urban landscapes. Following recurrent fires in the Delhi landfills in recent years, Delhi’s administrators have extensively deployed trommel machines at these sites with a view to segregate the waste, disperse them for recycling and in the process reduce the size of these garbage mounts. 

With Indian cities destined to grow and expand further in order to cater to the economic aspirations of the world’s largest population, the resultant demand for housing is also set to create greater stress on urban waste management models and infrastructure. The imperative of pursuing dependable bio-mining policies and frameworks, hence, has become integral to urban development architectures along with the need to devise innovative means to harness the commercial spin-offs of bio-mining outputs. Equally significant is the need for a policy framework and government stimulus to permeate the operational presence or deployment of waste-to-energy plants in all urban areas across the country. This can be done on mission mode as done int he case of solar plants or other renewable energy resources.  

Furthermore, the possibility of converting existing landfills into cityscape beautification projects and public utility areas, as seen in many western cities, is an option India’s city planners will have to consider. However, covering up a landfill and opening up a new one in another suburban area cannot be pursued as an alternate option. Rather, the transition should be towards facilities that do not end up as a landfill or dumping ground but instead becomes a facility for effective recycling and energy production. The time when any mofussil area of a fledging city is forced to bear the brunt of the city’s waste should be behind us.   

Revisiting developmental paradigms 

The Kerala High Court’s observation that Kochi had turned into a ‘gas chamber’ merely echoes the condition that residents of Delhi and the NCR experience every year before the onset of winter, when an assortment of factors including stubble burning in adjoining states, festival crackers, vehicular pollution, and so on, convert the region into a real gas chamber. What Kochi experienced in the last fortnight has been a regular phenomenon in Delhi and the NCR for over a decade and more. 

It is, hence, only a matter of improvidence that other cities have not prepared for such eventualities, despite such a painstaking experience in the country's own national capital. For that matter, lessons that other cities must learn from Delhi are not just about landfills and stubble burning, but also about vehicular pollution which is converting every major Indian city or metropolis into potential gas chambers. 

The fact that the country is just beginning to adapt to policies that restrict the vehicle usage life, and still not backed by sufficient consumer initiatives or cannibalising infrastructure for junking over-age vehicles, is evidence of how we as a country wake up late to social imperatives for common good.   

Nonetheless, be it the case of issues arising out of urban waste or vehicular pollution and congestion, all of which are making our cities a miserable living experience, the fundamental problem lies in our failure to develop suitable and sustainable development models. Following the liberalisation of the Indian economy, the country systematically discarded its socialist models of development and welfare in favour of a system that is market-driven and primed on the centrality of profit and wealth generation. 

While this has normalised immoral human attributes like greed and blind pursuit of wealth, the outcome is not just the mainstreaming of commercially-oriented missions that runs roughshod over social and community considerations or interests of marginalised communities. Rather, such market-driven models have ensured that wealth generation and prosperity are centred only around urban areas, cities and metropolises, which, in turn, has triggered feverish rural-to-urban migration, aggravated urban poverty, raised costs of living, and, above all, made denizens of cities less conscious of social roles and responsibilities of citizenry.   

With e-governance catching up in public administration, the need to de-centralise governance systems to districts and consequentially encourage depopulation of state capitals, which are often metropolitan areas, is yet to dawn on Indian administrators. 

Similarly, with service sectors like IT supplanting manufacturing as the country’s key growth engine, the epicentre of corporate and commercial activity has also, in recent years, shifted to business sub-districts and semi-industrial parks dotting suburbs of almost all the major metropolises in the country. 

With India emerging as the most populous nation, the need to revisit these development paradigms and work towards greater de-centralisation and relocation of governance and economic apparatus to under-developed parts of the country has become necessary, as much as the need to revert to a welfare-centric society than a wealth-centric polity. 

Issues like landfill fires, vehicular pollution, congestion and urban crime might only come at the long end of the rope whose shorter end lies entrenched in these fundamental matters.