As several Bengali-speaking migrants and other staff members flee the capital city in recent days out of fear amid a police verification and detention drive, the Gurgaon city stinks with garbage lying openly everywhere. Gurugram’s gated luxury towers now stand amid rotten garbage, threatening to paralyse its already fragile water management system.

This fallout of several domestic workers and sanitation staff is swift and visible. Since garbage is piling up in residential sectors, collection systems are collapsing, and residents are finding it hard to manage their waste on their own.

From Sector 103 to Palam Vihar, Sector 56, 57, Golf Course Extension Road, Gurugram-Faridabad Road, Sector 29, and new developing sectors, streets are filled with garbage bags and trash lying in the open.

To address the problem, several housing societies have hired tractor trolleys to transport waste to dumping yards, but the staff is not trained for segregation, resulting in indiscriminate dumping. This could threaten Gurugram with a full-blown health emergency and may prove disastrous.

Situation of Gurgaon Presntly

“They didn’t even inform us—many just vanished overnight out of fear,” was the statement of a resident to the national media. She is also the waste volunteer at Sector 57. Other residents and activists are also in a state of panic as the mass departure stems from a series of detentions targeting Bengali-speaking informal workers.

Around a hundred individuals were allegedly picked up by the police between July 13–21, and many of them were employed as house helps or garbage collectors. While five were released—reportedly on the condition that they board a train to Assam—the status of the others detained is still not known.

According to the residents of Gurgaon, the detainees are Indian citizens who have lived in Gurugram for more than five years. Their immediate fallout has been devastating, as informal workers subcontracted by the Municipal Corporation of Gurugram (MCG) to collect garbage door-to-door have disappeared. This entire system has collapsed in multiple neighbourhoods.

“Gurgaon’s base service has catastrophically failed… MCG’s disregard for SWM Rules 2016, and failure to institutionalise waste workers has brought the system to its knees. Indiscriminate dumping and burning are on the rise,” says Ruchika Sethi Takkar, founder of Citizen for Clean Air.

According to her, the citizen group has submitted a representation to the MCG and the Deputy Commissioner demanding an emergency contingency plan. Key demands include a temporary drive, waste depot arrangements, public communication, and stopgap measures for daily waste collection.