From Dumping Ground to Charging Ground: India's Net Zero Reckoning
Nobody talks about the smell. Not in policy meetings. Not in climate summits. Not in the glossy reports about India's green future. But if you have ever lived near a landfill, or even driven past one on a humid afternoon, you know exactly what three decades of ignored waste smells like. It smells like a problem we kept pushing to the edge of the city and pretending was solved. It was never solved. We just stopped looking. The Pile We Built Together India is not short of ambition. We launched the world's largest renewable energy programme. We planted billions of trees. We made headlines for doing things at a scale most countries cannot imagine. And yet, our waste management in India story remains stuck in a loop that would embarrass a much poorer nation. We collect. We dump. We repeat. Over 60% of municipal solid waste in India never sees a treatment facility. It lands on low-lying ground, often near the poorest neighbourhoods, and quietly decomposes into a climate problem nob...