ECHOES OF BLEAK HOUSE: Confronting India's Waste Management Crisis

IN HIS CLASSIC novel Bleak House, published in 1853, Charles Dickens masterfully illustrates the failure of managing waste in the city of London.

- Bibek Debroy, Amit Kapoor & Aditya Sinha

Dickens vividly describes the fictional street, Tom-All-Alone’s, as an appalling and squalid urban environment, teeming with filth and refuse. The air is thick with a miasma of decay, and the ground is perpetually soddened from the heaps of waste that seem to have melded with the very fabric of the street. Amidst the mounting piles of garbage, Dickens introduces Jo, a young street sweeper, who is emblematic of the invisible masses trying to eke out a living in the squalor. Through his portrayal of Jo, Dickens brings to light the consequences of a city ill-equipped to manage its waste, and the inevitable human cost of this negligence. The poignant account of Jo and Tom-All-Alone’s serves as a powerful reminder of the urgent need for effective urban solid waste management, a problem that continues to plague cities in India and beyond, even in the modern era.

The precarious state of landfills and open dumping sites in Indian cities harkens back to the dismal conditions of London during the era depicted in Bleak House. Metropolitan areas such as Delhi and Mumbai face particularly dire circumstances, generating vast amounts of waste daily while grappling with a scarcity of suitable dumping grounds. For example, the Deonar landfill in Mumbai, established in 1927, is both the oldest and largest landfill in India. Receiving 9,000 metric tonnes of waste each day, it teeters on the brink of collapse. Likewise, the Bhalswa landfill in Delhi, in operation since 1994, is overburdened with decaying waste, having long exceeded its intended carrying capacity.

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