Many people have died, got diseases like cancer, asthma, birth defects, low birth rate & many more and many protests are happening across the country against landfills / waste management projects in residential areas since so many years but Ministry of Environment & Forests (MoEF) has not yet came up with definitive Municipal Solid Waste (Management & Handling) Rules aka MSW Rules.

MSW Rules were first introduced in year 2000 to provide a legal framework for managing municipal waste and clearly laid guidelines to have landfills / waste management facilities to be setup at minimum 500 meters distance along with a buffer / no-development zone of 500 meters from a residential cluster.

These rules were updated later and minimum distance criteria & size of no-development buffer zone of 500 meters each were replaced with 'appropriate' distance to give autonomy to each municipal authority who have abused their autonomy to great extent across the country.

Till how long this shameless abuse of power by local municipal authorities will continue? How long they will play with our lives?

Landfills and / or waste management plants are not supposed to be in proximity to residential areas but no one is paying any heed and every local municipal authority is implementing MSW Rules per their convenience.

Please refer to http://www.hallofshame.org.in for list of few issues cropped up due to these landfills / waste management plants in residential clusters. Eye-opener???

MoEF has released most recent MSW Rules 2013 via their public website and still have not corrected decade old mistake of not specifying minimum distance from residential cluster & size of no-development buffer zone.

MoEF has invited comments / suggestions on the Draft Municipal Waste (Management & Handling) Rules 2013 from all stakeholders within 60 days from 29.08.2013 via http://moef.nic.in/so-1978-e.

Let us sign the petition to register our objections to the Draft version of the rules and make sure that landfills are situated far away from residential clusters in the interest of citizens and not the municipal authorities.

PS: The objections to MSW (M&H) were required to be submitted to secy-mef@nic.in but emails are bouncing back hence sending objections directly to Smt. Jayanthi Natrajan, Honorable Minister of Environment & Forests.

Yours Sincerely,

Taran Dhingra