MCG Finds Industrial Waste Bags in Sector 23A

GURUGRAM: Municipal Corporation of Gurugram officials inspecting a vacant Haryana Shehri Vikas Pradhikaran site in Sector 23A found 20 to 30 large bags of suspected industrial waste, a day after residents flagged dumping at the plot, Additional Commissioner Yash Jaluka said.

Jaluka ordered sanitation staff to open and inspect every bag and trace its source. He said the civic body had identified companies that dumped the waste and would issue challans to those firms as well as to their waste-collection vendors for open dumping. Teams that visited some of the firms reported that staff there misbehaved with officials, he added.

Residents and the Carterpuri backup dump

Sector 23A residents had already confronted MCG and HSVP teams earlier in the week over garbage diverted to the plot while the Carterpuri secondary waste collection point undergoes renovation. MCG had said the diversion would last about 10 to 15 days. Residents argued that a developed residential pocket next to a hospital-reserved HSVP plot should not become a temporary dump even for a short period.

Bhawani Shankar Tripathy, a Sector 23A resident, said the senior sanitary inspector on site had no clear answer on where the industrial bags had come from and that the finding raised questions about whether industrial units were also using the residential stretch for open disposal. Another resident whose house faces the dump said the end of monsoon had brought mosquitoes, dusty roads and a rotten smell, and that mixed industrial waste made the situation worse.

Officials told residents that work on the Carterpuri secondary collection point should finish in about 10 days. A second heavy-duty excavator has been pressed into service for faster lifting, residents said, though the number of dumpers has not risen in step. HSVP engineers had earlier objected to municipal solid waste being tipped on the authority's land without clear permission.

The episode sits inside a wider post-strike sanitation backlog. After safai workers resumed duty, MCG Commissioner Pradeep Dahiya had ordered faster clearing of garbage-vulnerable points, secondary centres and markets, and directed challans against illegal dumping on roads and vacant plots. Sector 23A shows how temporary diversion sites can slide into mixed waste if vendor chains are not watched.

Jaluka's challan plan against both generators and collection vendors is meant to break that chain. Residents want the bags lifted, the site cleaned and a public assurance that industrial waste will not return once Carterpuri reopens. Until then, Sector 23A households closest to the plot say they are living with smell, pests and dust while two civic agencies argue over temporary use of HSVP land.

The industrial-bag find also sharpens an inter-agency question that residents raised when HSVP engineers first stopped municipal tipping on the hospital-reserved plot. If MCG needed a short diversion while Carterpuri was renovated, residents ask why vendor trucks were not tagged and why industrial waste could enter a municipal diversion stream at all. Jaluka's order to challan both generators and collectors is an attempt to answer that with paperwork and fines rather than only apologies.

Sanitation supervisors have been told to open every suspicious bag before it is lifted, so that hazardous or industrial fractions are not quietly remixed into household waste bound for Bandhwari. Whether that discipline survives once the secondary point reopens will be the real test for Sector 23A. Residents say they will film any return of unmarked bags and escalate to both the commissioner and the HSVP administrator.