Urban News

The Supreme Court on Wednesday expressed shock at the inaction of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) in addressing the absence of a boundary wall to prevent the flow of waste from a 70-acre landfill site next to the Ghazipur abattoir.

“Your message to the citizen may be, ‘Sir, eat filthy fish and equally filthy meat’, or ‘My dear citizen, try not to eat fish or meat here as they are both made in equally filthy circumstances’,” the three-judge Special Bench of Justices V S Sirpurkar, Cyriac Joseph and Deepak Verma said.

The landfill site, according to MCD’s own affidavit in Supreme Court, contains 68.6 per cent soil, 12 per cent plastic, 14.4 per cent stone, 0.9 per cent rubber or stock leather, 3.2 per cent rotting clothes, 0.2 per cent glass, and 0.7 per cent metal.

Equally troubling for the court is an open drain flowing next to the abattoir — the MCD told the court it does not remember when the drain was last cleaned.

The agency also admitted that “municipal waste at three sites — Ghazipur, Okhla and Bhalswa — collected for over one-and-a-half decades has been increasing at an exponential rate”. Despite these revelations, the MCD does not doubt the Ghazipur abattoir’s ability to “meet the increased demand for meat during the Commonwealth Games”.

The abattoir, widely publicised as a state-of-the-art facility, was launched in December 2008 amid protests from the city’s meat traders. The MCD had incidentally decided to shift meat trade to Delhi’s outskirts to prevent pollution caused by the slaughterhouses at Idgah.

The abattoir has a capacity to slaughter 5,000 livestock a day and 10,000 animals in two shifts. But the meat traders, represented by senior advocate Fali Nariman, told the court that the actual demand crosses 30,000 animals per day in Delhi alone, a claim rejected by MCD as “exaggerated”.

The court directed the MCD to “forget hollow promises” and gave it two weeks to present “concrete steps” to segregate the market from the landfill site with a boundary wall. The civic body was also directed to clean the drain so there is a “semblance of neatness in the abattoir”.

The Bench said, “We do not want any promises... We want to see definite, concrete steps taken on what has been done and what is to be done by you. In short, a complete map.”

The hour-long hearing began with the Bench declaring that it intends to dispose of the case today as it cannot be “expected to monitor abattoirs in the city for an eternity”.

But the tone of the court session changed when Nariman, assisted by advocate Syed Ahmed Saud and representing a registered society called All India Jamiatul Qureshi, said the “authorities have been utterly irresponsible”.

“Cleaning of the drain and building a boundary wall is the minimum you can do to show your bona fide — your claims are hollow and your promises are not kept,” the court told MCD counsel Sanjib Sen.

Sen countered that the petition in the apex court was filed by an “unsuccessful bidder”, to which the court said it was not bothered with “any bidders but interested in knowing what you (MCD) have done with the drain, the boundary wall and the sanitary landfill site”. When was the drain last cleaned? Is it cleaned on a daily, weekly, monthly basis — do you know?” the court asked.