The roof overhead and the ground beneath their feet, crumbled

There’s a clock on a dilapidated shelf that’s frozen in time: 8.10 a.m. It was about that time on March 21 that hundreds of families in Howrah district’s Belgachia slum area, felt the ground slip away from under their feet.

Belgachia bhagar is a garbage dumping ground across 100 acres of land. Here, mountains of trash, almost 150 meters high, tower to the height of a 15-storey building. About 20 km from Kolkata, the area smells of rot, a cocktail of decay and chemicals. It bears the load of the 550-600 tons of waste generated daily by Howrah, a city on the banks of the Hooghly river.

On the morning of March 21, the mountain of waste crumbled under its own weight. In the process, it burst water pipes and cut electric lines. Many residents of the slum were left without water and electricity for almost two weeks. About 100-150 families bore the brunt as their homes developed major cracks.

On the street

A few metres away from the dumping ground, Deepak Yadav, 32, lies on the pavement under a scorching midday sun trying to get some shut-eye. Like the others around him, he has made a makeshift bed out of rags from the dump. Beside him is his single-storey house, its walls collapsed into each other. In the only room that is intact, two family photographs hang from the wall, askew. Stuffed toys, a child’s bicycle, and a rag lie on the floor. Deepak stares into the fractured room and within a second, collapses into tears.

“My children have been begging me to preserve their toys. This house is only two years old. It was my dream to build my own house. I shed blood, sweat, and tears for it. I took a loan of ₹1.5 lakh from different sources. But we became homeless before I could even repay it,” he says.

In the colony, the men sleep in makeshift beds outside their homes, guarding what is left. The women, children, and the elderly are at a relief camp in a school nearby. Disjointed pieces of furniture lie in the sun; the families had taken them out of their crumbling houses for safekeeping.

“Our houses still make rumbling sounds. New cracks appear every day,” Deepak says. He adds that when they hear their houses rumbling, they run a distance and come back again.

Twice a day, Deepak and the others fill their water bottles from tankers sent by the Howrah Municipal Corporation (HMC). They rely on community kitchens for their meals. “There are so many people. Some days, the food and water get over before we can reach,” Deepak says.

He recalls March 20, when the ragpickers’ colony adjoining the landfill woke up to dry taps. “Every day, the water flow starts at 6 in the morning. When we woke up, we realised our taps had no water. We were told it was because the pipeline had broken the previous night, but we were not too worried because it had happened before,” he says. Deepak and his neighbours had anticipated that, like other times, the water would resume in a few hours. The next day, just past 8 a.m., the soft soil around Belgachia bhagar began to crack, then the roads, then the houses, all in quick succession. Then, the mountain of garbage developed cracks. People ran out of their houses. It was like an earthquake, residents say.

Mahesh Shaw, 39, sits outside his broken home, wondering if he can pick up the pieces and put his life together. He wipes his tears and sighs amidst the stench of the waste. “We are known as people who gather garbage. No one wants to rent out their homes to us even if we want to shift from here,” Mahesh says. He makes ₹100-400 a day and pays ₹1,200 every month as rent for a one-room house. Landlords elsewhere ask for a deposit of ₹10,000-20,000 for a room. Neither Mahesh nor his neighbours can afford that.

Moving mountains

In the light of what has happened, a meeting was convened on March 25. It was attended by Ministers, including Firhad Hakim, West Bengal Minister for Urban Development, Municipal Affairs and Housing; high-ranking police officers; and civic body and district officials from Kolkata and Howrah. They decided to relocate the waste to a stable location. Dhapa, a landfill near Kolkata; and Arupara, in Howrah, were shortlisted. There is also an empty ground close to the current garbage mountain in Belgachia which was to be a temporary fix.

Cracks have developed on the roads nearby after the land subsidence.
| Photo Credit:
DEBASISH BHADURI

On March 26, when earth movers began relocating the waste from the Belgachia landfill to Arupara, they were met with protests. “We do not want a new landfill here. We did not agree to live beside a dump when we bought our properties,” a protesting resident said angrily to the TV cameras pointed at him.

The Belgachia community is worried about their future. “This dump, which has ruined our homes, is also our only source of income. What will we do now?” Mahesh says. After the ground subsidence, the rag pickers are not allowed to enter the landfill. “Now our work is also at stake because the dumping ground is off limits for us. No one will give us any other work,” Mahesh adds.

The other side of the garbage dump

For over two weeks, residents on the other side of the garbage dump have been locked into their houses, because the earthquake-like situation has pushed out a sludge they must walk through. A sluggish, tar-like liquid, thick with oily residues, floating dead birds, and rodents has flooded the area. There are no cracks in houses here, because the residents are relatively economically better off than the ragpicker community.

Sludge-like water has seeped above the ground after the events of March 21 in Belgachia.
| Photo Credit:
DEBASISH BHADURI

Rina Das, 48, is recovering from breast cancer. At the doorstep of her one-room home is the knee-deep black water. She struggles to keep the family running with only two buckets of water supplied by the HMC. “We are not able to cook or bathe in this heat for over a week. How will we survive?” Rina says.

Dipa Singh, 20, talks about her mother’s struggles through her menstrual cycle. “The men can relieve themselves anywhere in extreme situations. What about us? If this continues, we can catch an infection at any time,” Dipa says.

A mother-son duo roll up their pants and walk through the water, trying to get home. The mother says their skin burns after having walked through the filth for weeks. She instructs her young son to wash his feet with antiseptic solution after they reach home.

Amid the chaos, a bucket seller has found a moment of soaring business. With his pants folded up, his head and shoulders laden with about 10 buckets, he hawks his wares loudly.

Politics over civic apathy

Since March 21, leaders from different political parties have been visiting Belgachia. Leader of the Opposition Suvendu Adhikari came on March 24, but had an altercation with the police. “Today, I went to meet the affected families, but the Mamata Police (Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee) tried to obstruct my path and even started a skirmish on the spot to deter me from meeting them,” Adhikari said to the media.

Subhankar Sarkar, the Congress West Bengal State president, visited the area too. The local Trinamool Congress MLA Manoj Tiwary gave some families ₹10,000 and ₹15,000. For the people affected by the situation, the visits bring little succour. Locals have staged protests stating that the authorities had repeatedly failed to take cognizsance of the situation for years.

The HMC has not elected members or councillors for the last six years. The locals have no one to hold accountable for the mismanagement. Bapi Manna, a board member of the HMC, says he understands that people are in distress, but, “this is a natural disaster which no one had a hand in”. He is overseeing work on an alternative water pipeline.

West Bengal Minister for Urban Development, Municipal Affairs and Housing Firhad Hakim visits the affected residents.
| Photo Credit:
DEBASISH BHADURI

The affected residents have been offered temporary accommodation in seven 20-foot shipping containers in a field adjoining the Chatra Milan Sangha club office in Belgachia, at least 5 km away from the landfill. Workers carve out windows and doors in the shipping containers, sectioning off 8×8 foot ‘rooms’ in each box.

On March 26, at a meeting at the Urban Development and Municipal Affairs office in Kolkata, Hakim said 96 families affected by the ground subsidence would be given new homes, under West Bengal’s Banglar Bari government scheme. The families would be given possession of these houses in the next year and a half, he said.

Gita Sau, 35, who lives next to the landfill and is one of the prospective beneficiaries of the compensatory housing, says life in “tin boxes” is hard. “The weather is already boiling. The summer months will be worse. Is it possible to live in tin houses in such heat? We [the residents] went and saw the arrangements, and we decided to stay where we are, even if that means living outside our broken homes,” she says.

For Aarti Paswan, 30, the water being provided by the municipality’s tankers “looks murky” and “is not fit for drinking”. She says it is taking a toll on their digestive systems. “We drink it because there is no water in our taps, and we cannot afford to buy bottled water. The sellers have also hiked the price of bottled water since demand surged,” she says.

A water tanker pulls up next to her house. As an elderly woman hunches over to fill her bucket, Aarti warns her, “Be careful, Ma. The water is not good.” Aarti says she hasn’t had a drop of water to drink through the day.

Experts point to an impending disaster

Partha Pratim Biswas, professor of construction engineering at Jadavpur University, believes that this could happen at any dumping ground if waste is not managed before it reaches the brink. He and his colleagues have been monitoring the situation to file an expert committee report about an impending disaster.

“The base soil has a carrying capacity, which has been exceeded here. There should be a restriction on the height and weight of the dump,” Biswas says. He explains that every landfill has a slope. “The stability of the slope depends on its waste composition. Here, biodegradable waste is over 40%, inert waste is around 35%, which can make the slope unstable if it gains too much height.” He says recycling most of the waste is the best solution to avoid such disasters; keeping the height and slope in constant check is also important. The capacity of the soil can be calculated through simple mathematical methods to mitigate mishaps. He says underground cracks can cause further chaos, especially because they are unseen.

Residents wade through sludge-filled, water-logged alleys to get to the water tankers which supply them their daily share of water.
| Photo Credit:
DEBASISH BHADURI

For Gita, survival is a daily negotiation. With a bag of prescriptions in hand, she clings to the little she has left — a meagre income from washing dishes at homes nearby and the belief that her son’s education will lead to a future beyond this existence of hardship. Her husband, who worked at a nearby factory, was fired after he failed to show up during the crisis.

An elderly man sits next to Aarti with tears running down his wrinkled cheeks. “Why wasn’t I buried in the debris when my house collapsed?”

shrabana.chatterjee@thehindu.co.in

moyurie.som@thehindu.co.in

Edited by Sunalini Mathew