Environmentalists, wildlife activists, and locals have sought immediate intervention by the Union Environment Ministry into the recurring illegal discharge of highly toxic, untreated leachate into the Aravalis from the Bandhwari landfill site on the Gurugram-Faridabad road, causing a health hazard to residents and wildlife.
In a letter to Union Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav, wildlife activist Vaishali Rana said that despite continuous complaints, orders, and monitoring by the National Green Tribunal (NGT), leachate continued to be discharged from the Bandhwari landfill into the surrounding Aravali forest and up to the outskirts of the village Bandhwari for almost three years.
The wildlife activist, pursuing the matter in the NGT since 2015, said in the letter that she was “writing in desperation and with the last hope of getting some relief from an environmental and human crisis that has been unfolding for nearly a decade in the Aravali”.
Attaching the latest videos and pictures, she claimed that the landfill lay barely a kilometre uphill from the village, and therefore, there was a continuous flow of leachate downhill directly towards the village and its surroundings.
“The crisis is not only humanitarian but ecological – the Aravali forest and its wildlife are being severely impacted. Multiple geo-stamped photographs and videos have been submitted to the NGT over the years showing leachate pooling in forest depressions and contaminating wildlife water holes,” she said, blaming the Municipal Corporation of Gurugram (MCG) for the situation.
