You separate your waste. Does your city keep it separated?

Separating waste at home is only the first step. In today's YOUR INDIA column, Santosh Nair looks at what happens after the garbage truck leaves, from open dumpsites and untreated waste to methane, leachate and the communities living beside India’s growing waste mountains.

A woman in a Delhi apartment carefully separates her kitchen waste into a green bin and a blue bin each morning, following instructions from her housing society’s notice board. She assumes this sorting matters, that it sends her waste down two different, responsible paths. Most days, both bins end up in the same municipal truck, and eventually, the same mountain of garbage on the edge of the city.

India generates over 159,000 tonnes of waste every single day. Scaled up across a year, national estimates put the figure at roughly 62 million tonnes. Of this enormous volume, only about 43 million tonnes actually gets collected by municipal systems in the first place. Of what is collected, only around 12 million tonnes receives any real treatment before disposal. The remaining 31 million tonnes is simply discarded into open dumping grounds. Put together, roughly 19 per cent of India’s waste is properly treated. Everything else, more than 80 per cent, ends up collected but untreated, or never collected at all.

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Where does your garbage actually go?

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