There are hours on the dilapidated shelf that is frozen in time: 8.10 AM was 21 March at the time that hundreds of families in the Slum area in the Belgachia of the Howrah district felt the ground slipping under their feet.
Belgachia Bhagar is a dump of garbage per 100 acres of land. Here, the mountains of the garbage, almost 150 meters high, the tower up to a height of the 15-storey building. About 20 km from Calcutta, the area smells of rot, a cocktail of disintegration and chemicals. It has a load of 550-600 tons of waste generated daily by Howrah, the city on the banks of the Hooghla River.
On the morning of March 21, the mountain of the waste disintegrated under its own weight. In this process, the water pipes burst and cuts the electrical line. Many slum residents were left without water and electricity for almost two weeks. About 100-150 families carried the onslaught when their homes developed the main cracks.
On the street
A few meters away from the landfill, Deepak Yadav, 32, lies on the sidewalk under the burning noon sun and try to get some closed eye. Like the others around him, he made a temporary bed of dump rags. Next to him is his one -storey house, his walls collapsed. In a single room that is intact, it hangs from the wall of two family photos, Askew. The floor lies on the floor filled toys, a baby wheel and a rag. Deepak stares into a broken room and collapses in tears in a second.
“My children begged me to keep my toys. This house is only two years old. It was my dream to build my own house. I threw blood, sweat and tears.
In the colony, men sleep in makeshift beds outside their homes and guard what is left. Women, children and seniors are in relief in a nearby school. In the sun lies discontinuous pieces of furniture; Families took them from their decaying houses for storage.
A house destroyed by a decline in soil in Belgachia. | Photo Credit: Debasish Bhaduri
“Our houses are still making sound sounds. There are new cracks every day,” Deepak says. He adds that when they hear their houses, they run remotely and return.
Twice a day Deepak and others fill their water bottles from tankers sent by the municipal company Howrah (HMC). They rely on community kitchens for their food. “There are so many people. Sometimes food and water get before we get,” Deepak says.
He remembers on March 20, when the Ragpichers colony adjacent to the landfill woke up to dry taps. “Every day the water flows at 6 in the morning. When we woke up, we realized that our taps did not have water. We were told that it was because the pipeline broke the previous night, but we were not very worried because it happened before,” he says. Deepak and his neighbors expected that, like ever, the water would be restored in a few hours. The next day, just after 8:00, the soft soil around Belgachie Bhagar began to burst, then the road, then the houses, all in quick succession. Then the garbage mountain developed cracks. People reached their houses. It was like an earthquake, the inhabitants say.
Mahesh Shaw, 39, sits off his broken home and wondered if he could raise the pieces and put his life together. He wiped tears and sighed in the middle of the odor of the waste. “We are known as people who collect garbage. No one wants to rent us their homes, even if we want to move from here,” says Mahesh. It earns £ 100-400 per day and pays 1,200 ₹ for rent for a single house every month. Extents elsewhere, landlords apply for a deposit of 10 000–20 000 GBP per room. Neither Mahesh nor his neighbors can afford it.
Moving mountain
With regard to what happened, a meeting of March 25 was convened. He was attended by ministers, including Firhad Hakim, Minister of West Bengal for the development of cities, municipal affairs and housing; high -ranking police officers; and civil and district officials from Calcutta and Howrah. They decided to move the waste to a stable place. DHAPA, landfill near Kolkata; And Arupara, in Howrah, was included in the narrower selection. In Belgachia there is also an empty country near the current mountain of garbage, which was supposed to be a temporary repair.
Cracks have been developed on the roads after a nearby procedure. | Photo Credit: Debasish Bhaduri
26th March, when the moving land began to move waste from the landfill of Belgachie to Arupara, they met protests. “We don’t want a new landfill. We disagreed that we would live next to the landfill when we bought our properties,” said an angry protesting inhabitant who pointed to him angrily.
The Belgachie community is worried about its future. “This landfill that destroyed our homes is also our only source of income. What are we going to do now?” Says Mahesh. After the Earth drop, the rag collectors must not enter the landfill. “Now our work is also at stake, because the landfill is out of the limits for us. No one will give us any other job,” adds Mahesh.
The other side of the garbage dump
For more than two weeks, the inhabitants on the other side of the waste landfill have been locked into their houses, because the situation similar to the earthquakes pushed the sludge to pass. The area was flooded with slow liquid similar to tar, thick oily remains, floating dead birds and rodents. There are no cracks in the houses, because the inhabitants are relatively economically better than the Ragpicker community.
Water similar to sludge leaked over the ground after the events of 21 March in Belgachia. | Photo Credit: Debasish Bhaduri
Rina Das, 48, is recovering from breast cancer. At the door of her one -room house, the knee is deep black water. They try to keep the family running with only two buckets of water supplied by HMC. “We can’t cook or bathe for more than a week in this heat. How do we survive?” Rina says.
Dipa Singh, 20, talks about the fighting of her mother through the menstrual cycle. “Men can relax anywhere in extreme situations. What about us? If it goes on, we can capture the infection at any time,” says Dipa.
Mother-Syna duo undressed pants and walked through water and tried to get home. The mother says their skin burns after she walked dirt for weeks. He instructs his young son to wash their legs with an antiseptic solution after getting home.
In the middle of chaos, the bucket dealer found a moment of increasing business. With folded pants, his head and shoulders loaded with about 10 buckets, they crash their goods loudly.
Policy over civil apathy
From 21st March, the leaders of various political parties have been visited by Belgachia. The leader of the opposition of Suvend Adhikari came on March 24, but had a quarrel with the police. “Today I went to meet with disabled families, but the police (Mamata Mamata Baerjee) tried to defend my journey and even began a skirmish on the spot to discourage me from meeting them,” Adhikari told the media.
The area was also visited by Subhankar Sarkar, State President of the Congress of West Bengal. The local Congress Trinamool Mla Manoi Tiwary gave some families 10,000 and 15,000 GBP. For people affected by the situation, visits bring little help. The locals organized protests in which the authorities have repeatedly failed to compare the situation for years.
In the last six years, HMC has not chose members or councilors. Local residents have no one to respond for a bad management. Bapi Manna, a member of the HMC Board, says he understands that people are in need, but “it is a natural disaster in which no one had a hand”. It oversees the work of an alternative water pipe.
The Minister of City Development, Urban Development, Urban Affairs and Housing Firhad Hakim visits affected residents. | Photo Credit: Debasish Bhaduri
Disabled people were offered temporary accommodation in seven 20-foot shipping containers in the field adjacent to the club office in the cottage Milan Sangha in Belgachia, at least 5 km from the landfill. Workers carve windows and doors in shipping containers and divide the “rooms” of 8×8 legs in each box.
On March 26, at a meeting in the Office for Cities and City Affairs in Calcutta, Hakim said that 96 families affected by a ground decline will be provided by new homes, under the government government Banglar Bari. Families should have ownership next year and a half, he said.
For 35 years, Gita Sau, who lives next to the landfill and is one of the potential recipients of compensatory housing, says that life in “tin boxes” is difficult. “The weather is already cooked. The summer months will be worse. It is possible to live in tin houses in such heat?
For Aarti Paswan, 30, water provided by tankers of the village “looks murky” and “not suitable for drinking”. He says he takes 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. Sellers have also increased the price of bottled water since the demand has been in demand,” he says.
A water tanker is pulled next to her house. When an older woman undresses to fill her bucket, Aarti warns her: “Be careful, ma. Water is not good.” Aarti says she didn’t have a drop of water during the day.
Experts point to the upcoming disaster
Parta Pratim Biswas, a professor of building engineering at the University of Jadavpur, believes that this may happen at any landfill if the waste is not managed before it reaches. He and his colleagues watched the situation to report on the expert committee of the upcoming disaster.
“The basic soil has a load capacity that has been exceeded here. It should be limited by the height and weight of the landfill,” says Biswas. He explains that every dump has a slope. “The stability of the slope depends on its waste composition. Here is biologically degradable waste over 40%, inert waste is around 35%, which may be an unstable slope if it gains too much height.” He says that recycling most of the waste is the best solution to avoid these disasters; It is also important to maintain the height and slope in constant control. Soil capacity can be calculated by means of simple mathematical methods to alleviate accidents. It says underground cracks can cause additional chaos, especially because they are not visible.
The inhabitants waded through the sludge filled with water -managed streets to reach the water tankers that give them their daily share of the water. | Photo Credit: Debasish Bhaduri
For Gita, the survival of everyday negotiations. With a bag of regulations in his hand, she adheres to a small one who has left – a modest intake of washing foods nearby and belief that her son’s education will lead to the future even after this existence of hardship. Her husband, who worked in a nearby factory, was released after he could not show up during the crisis.
In next to Aarti, an older man sits and tears run down wrinkles. “Why wasn’t I buried in ruins when my house collapsed?”
SHRABANA.Chatterje@thehind.co.in
Moyurie.som@thehind.co.in
Edit Sunalini Mathew
Published – April 6, 2025 20:13
