Action plans for remediating around 1,000 legacy landfill sites that contain a total of 12.8 crore metric tonnes of waste have been approved under the Swachh Bharat Mission, said Union Housing and Urban Affairs Minister Hardeep Singh Puri on Thursday.
Inaugurating the ‘Swachh Shehar Samvad’ and a tech exhibition here, Mr. Puri said under the ‘Lakshya Zero Dumpsite Challenge’ all legacy landfills, which contain 16 crore MT of waste in total and take up 15,000 acre of land, would be remediated. So far, the Ministry has approved projects worth ₹8,000 crore, of which ₹3,000 crore would be the Union government’s share, for remediation of over 1,000 such sites, he added.
Mr. Puri noted that all the 4,372 urban local bodies in the country have been declared open defecation-free and waste processing capacity has been increased from 18% in 2014, when the Mission was launched, to 73% currently. “We are now accelerating implementation to reach 100% saturation at the earliest,” he said.
Under the Swachh Bharat Mission Urban 2.0, which was launched last year, the Ministry has set a target of “garbage free cities” and 100% remediation of legacy landfills across the country.
