PMSPL’s Illegal Garbage Dumping Relocates from Kurumbapet to Karuvadaikuppam

Pondicherry's dumpsite at Karuvadaikuppam

I feared I wouldn’t survive to tell this story, riding through Pondicherry’s Karuvadaikuppam dumpsite in the cabin of a PMSPL compactor. Lumbering across the peaks and valleys of trash, the truck lurched, slid and swayed violently. Seated precariously between me and the driver, one of my companions exclaimed, “This truck is gonna have a short life!” The driver, wearing a handkerchief over his nose and mouth, wrestled with the steering wheel to keep the vehicle from toppling. As the truck went into a nose dive, I braced myself against the dashboard and fleetingly pondered the odds of compactors being equipped with airbags. From the sweltering, fly-infested cabin, I peered through the grimy passenger window – closed to keep out the dump’s suffocating smoke and stench – at the noxious ocean of smoldering garbage that we appeared to be sinking into. Into his cellphone the driver impatiently shouted “Tell me where to go!” to a man in a yellow construction helmet beside a distant backhoe, barely visible through the haze.

I was accompanying two colleagues to Karuvadaikuppam dumpyard to document illegal dumping of mixed municipal waste by Puducherry Municipal Services Private Limited (PMSPL), a joint venture between Puducherry Urban Development Agency (PUDA) and PUDA’s co-conspirator, Kivar Environ, a Bangalore-based waste hauling outfit. Last week, PMSPL was ordered to stop dumping mixed garbage at Kurumbapet, after protests by students and faculty of the nearby Rajiv Gandhi Veterinary College. Rather than bring their waste management practices into compliance with government regulations that mandate recycling and composting, PMSPL instead predictably chose the cheaper option — relocate their illegal dumping operation to Karuvadaikuppam.

When I jumped down from the compactor’s cabin, I was greeted by a tribe of Gypsies who reside at the dump and earn their living by collecting and selling recyclable trash. The sudden inflow of approximately 275 tons of trash per day at Karuvadaikuppam is keeping them busy. They posed briefly for photos before descending upon the detritus being extruded from the compactor I’d arrived in.

PMSPL's compactor dumping 7 tons of mixed municipal waste in Karuvadaikuppam

Gypsies begin picking over the fresh load

A soda bottle is recovered

A boy salvages a bottle of toilet bowl cleaner

A girl picks through the load

The children search for plastic, metal and food

A bottle of Pepsi is finished

For the Gypsies, it’s a race to rummage through each load and extract sellable waste before the next compactor arrives and dumps. In the intense sunshine, the heaps of waste soon catch fire from methane created during decomposition.

Veera found an orange

Urvasi (wearing pink blouse) with leaping boy

Urvasi found a Diet Coke can

Urvasi pauses from her work

Veera's shirt says, "I Ooze Coolness"

Gayatri pauses from her work to pose for a photo

Fire reduces the waste to charred residue, which Coromandel Fertilizer is exhuming, sieving and marketing to farmers as “organic compost”.

A previous day's garbage smolders

Coromandel Fertilizer markets Pondicherry’s trash ash to farmers as “organic compost”