New Delhi: One-and-a-half years after Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) built a bamboo park on a five-acre reclaimed site at Bhalswa landfill and planted over 4,000 saplings, the park has disappeared, with the corporation now using the site for dumping inert waste.
The bamboo plantation was launched in March 2025 in the presence of chief minister Rekha Gupta and then LG VK Saxena. The plan then was to plant around 54,000 bamboo saplings in all. However, a month later, TOI reported that several saplings had started withering, with officials citing soil conditions at the reclaimed landfill site as unsuitable for their survival.
Multiple attempts to grow bamboo at the site failed, following which the decision was taken to use the land for waste processing and dumping, according to MCD officials. A replantation exercise was carried out, but that too failed as leachate (contaminated liquid) at the base of the flattened landfill did not allow the plants to grow,” one of the officials said. “After putting in a lot of effort to revive and maintain the plantation, it was ultimately decided, in view of operational necessity for processing legacy waste, to repurpose the site,” the official said, adding, “We have flattened a site close to the entry of the site and will soon use it for a fresh plantation.
They were regularly watered and monitored. Despite these efforts, many of them could not survive. They described the initiative as a significant step towards creating a cleaner, greener and more liveable urban environment in Delhi. A fresh plantation drive was subsequently carried out, and the Union minister for housing and urban affairs, who adopted the site, visited it.
“After a plantation drive was completed in March last year, the bamboo plants were tended to for over a year.
“Officials at Bhalswa landfill admitted that garbage was again being dumped on 25 acres of land where a mountain of garbage had been removed during AAP’s tenure and where bamboo saplings were planted. The issue was recently highlighted by Praveen Kumar, former AAP MLA and party co-in-charge in MCD. On whose orders was the plantation destroyed? Why was garbage dumped again on the cleared land? BJP should stop misleading Delhi on the issue of mountains of garbage,” AAP posted on X.