A garbage mountain in Delhi is being broken down. It's powering paper mills
It's sharp, heavy and impossible to ignore, hanging in the air long before the landscape reveals itself.
Then comes the mountain, or what looks like one.
Beyond a scatter of shrubs and ageing brick houses, an uneven mass rises against Delhi's horizon, its slopes looking unnatural. For a few moments, it could pass for a mountain.
The road leading towards the Bhalswa landfill is eerily uncrowded and quiet, with little to foreshadow the capital's waste crisis that lies ahead. A wide view of the waste at the Bhalswa landfill. (Photo: India Today/Aryan Rai)
Then the symptoms begin to appear; discarded plastic, rotting refuse, vultures and eagles circling overhead, and heaps of garbage lining the roadside.
By the time you reach the entrance, you are greeted by a stretch of muddy road or a cloud of dust, depending on the weather.
Trucks idle along the roadside, waiting for their turn to be loaded, each vehicle literally bearing the weight of a mountain that should never have existed.
Up close, Bhalswa is overwhelming.INSIDE A MOUNTAIN OF GARBAGE
The ground is peppered with plastic pipes, shoe soles, bags, glass bottles, pieces of concrete, animal waste from the meat mandis, and countless scraps of cloth; decades of human consumption piled up.
The smell of rotting waste hangs heavy and gaseous in the air, as preying birds circle overhead like a slow-moving tornado while excavators tear into the piles of waste.
For decades, Bhalswa grew upwards to a towering height, nurtured by tonnes of waste arriving from the national capital with multiple governments watching it rise. The entrance of the Bhalswa landfill is seen along with trucks and equipment. (Photo: India Today/Aryan Rai)
The Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD), the city's civic body, is racing to flatten the 70-acre landfill, one of the capital's three major dumpsites.
The latest official update said that 99.07 lakh metric tonnes of old, decades-buried garbage, what officials call legacy waste, had been cleared by July 31, with the remaining mound expected to be cleared by October 15. A large heap of waste is seen in a part of the Bhalswa landfill site. (Photo: India Today/Aryan Rai)
Officials have set an ambitious deadline of December 31, 2026, to clear the dumpsite completely.
But flattening the mountain is not as simple as digging up old garbage and carting it somewhere else.
The waste is excavated, sorted and divided into different types. Some is trucked to low-lying areas elsewhere in the city, some is sent to factories to be burned as fuel, while the rest is handled separately. (Photo: India Today/Aryan Rai) WHY BHALSWA LANDFILL BECAME HAZARD
The landfill’s decomposing waste produces methane, a combustible gas that can build up within the dump and contribute to fires.
A Delhi government report has previously linked fires at the city’s landfill sites to methane generated during the decomposition of garbage.
In April 2022, a major fire at Bhalswa burned for nearly 2 weeks, sending thick smoke into the neighbourhoods.
A study of the fire later found that average PM2.5 levels rose by 45–55% and PM10 by 40–50% during the blaze as burning mixed waste can release fine particles and other harmful pollutants, making the landfill an air-quality and health hazard. Workers are seen on the Bhalswa landfill site. (Photo: India Today/Aryan Rai) BHALSWA LANDFILL BEING TAKEN APART
On a regular day, workers move between machines as excavators lift waste from the towering mounds and drop it into sorting areas set up on site.
The process is called biomining, essentially digging up old, buried garbage and running it through machines that separate it into different piles.
The largest pile, accounting for 65-75% of the waste sorted each day at Bhalswa, is a soil-like residue officials call inert material. It is the fine debris left behind after the waste has been screened. An excavator is seen digging into heaps of waste on the Bhalswa landfill site. (Photo: India Today/Aryan Rai)
Another 8-10% is old construction rubble, including broken concrete, bricks and other building debris, officially classified as Construction and Demolition (C&D) waste.
The rest is known as Refuse-Derived Fuel (RDF), burnable waste that can serve as an alternative fuel for paper factories that traditionally rely on coal.
At the end of the day, each of these piles heads somewhere different. And that journey is what is slowly bringing the mountain down. A MCD truck is seen parked at the entrance of the landfill site. (Photo: India Today/Aryan Rai) WHERE DOES WASTE FROM BHALSWA LANDFILL GO?
The inert waste, the largest of the three piles, is trucked to low-lying parts of Delhi, including Narela and Rohini, where it is used to fill sunken ground, the official said.
Loaded onto trucks, it looks like dark, dusty earth kicked up in clouds as the vehicles rumble out past stray dogs, unbothered by the movement, picking through the dirt.
Every truck leaving Bhalswa frees up space for machines to dig deeper into what remains, years' worth of buried waste. JCB machines and excavators are seen parked with the garbage mountain in the bacground. (Photo: India Today/Aryan Rai)
The burnable waste, or RDF, takes a different route. It is sent to paper mills and cement factories outside Delhi and in nearby cities and towns, where it is burned in place of coal to fire industrial furnaces, the official said.
Under an overcast sky, behind a rusted and broken fence nearby, a line of JCB machines waits to move towards the mound, while others are already at work deeper inside.
The official clarified that the aim is not simply to shift an entire mountain of garbage from one place to another, but to break it apart and send it somewhere it can actually be used. A line of JCB machines are seen waiting to be put to work. (Photo: India Today/Aryan Rai) A RACE AGAINST TIME
The work, however, does not always run smoothly.
On some days, heavy rain turns the ground into mud. Extreme heat slows workers down. And fresh garbage continues to arrive, around 4,000 tonnes every day, mostly solid that is decomposable.
In mid-August, between 12,000 and 14,000 tonnes of old, buried waste were being cleared every day, "at a cost of around Rs 400 per tonne paid to a joint venture of third-party contractors," according to a senior MCD official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Old brick houses in the area are seen with the part of the waste mountain in the background. (Photo: India Today/Aryan Rai)
A government review in May 2026 pointed to a similar pace of around 15,000 tonnes of waste being processed daily. Nearly 43 of the site's 70 acres had been cleared, and about 23.17 lakh metric tonnes of waste, old and newly added, still remained.
The scale of the operation becomes clearer when compared with where it began. Bhalswa held roughly 73 lakh metric tonnes of old waste in June 2022, when the round-the-clock clean-up first began.
Bhalswa is also part of a larger cleanup push across Delhi, with MCD committing to clear the Bhalswa and Okhla landfills by 2026 and Ghazipur by 2027. Pipes run throguh an area surrounded by the waste from the landfill. (Photo: India Today/Aryan Rai)
Access to the landfill's deeper sections was not permitted, as it required clearance from the MCD's head office.
From the edge, however, the process was clear enough.
Excavators cut into the waste, trucks were loaded with heaps of garbage and vultures wheeled overhead.
Bhalswa is being flattened, but the garbage is not disappearing into thin air. It's being dug up, sorted and shipped out as fill material, factory fuel and other processed waste. Birds are seen circling over the Bhalswa landfill. (Photo: India Today/Aryan Rai)
Whether the December 31 deadline is met will determine how much of Bhalswa's transformation is truly complete by the end of the year, and whether the Delhi government and the municipal corporation win its race against time.- EndsPublished By: Aryan Published On: Sep 11, 2026 07:30 IST
