Between 2011 and 2024, Nagaland state registered the highest urban population growth rate in India, with 66.7 percent increase. (Morung file Photo)
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Asiya Kochuveettil Muhammed, MRSB
Mumbai
Every year on 5 June, World Environment Day asks us to look at the planet we call home, one we are inheriting and the one we are leaving behind. It urges us to send a signal back to an Earth already in crisis. And the first step towards it should be managing our waste efficiently.
On any given morning across cities, a familiar scene plays out: waste is segregated at homes, with sorting kitchen waste from plastics, and collection vehicles make their rounds. We tell ourselves we have done our part. But just across the road we can see the waste dumped in open, leachate seeps into soil, and air laced with particulate matter and toxic compounds. The waste segregation is done at household level is only the first step in a long and fragile chain of waste management. So breaking that chain at any point undoes every effort invested before it.
Nagaland’s Growing Waste Crisis
Between 2011 and 2024, the state registered the highest urban population growth rate in India, with 66.7 percent increase. Urban areas now generate about 300 tonnes of solid waste everyday of which Dimapur alone accounts for 90,000 to 100,000 kg/day. Lack of scientific waste treatment plant in the region leads to open dumping remain the primary method of disposal an approach that leads to uncontrolled dumping, and long-term soil and groundwater contamination.
The Northeast’s Unique Vulnerability
What makes irresponsible waste disposal particularly dangerous in the Northeast is the region’s extraordinary ecological sensitivity. The Northeast is one of India’s most biodiverse regions with hilly terrain, high rainfall, and distinct climate zones. These can create technical challenges that national waste policies which are often designed for flat urban plains, do not adequately address. Making centralised waste treatment infrastructure harder to justify and operate. Thus the region deserves specialised policy attention and adequate funding, rather than the standardised frameworks applied to other urban cities like Kolkata or Pune.
Hazardous Waste: The Invisible Threat
Usually the general public views visible waste like the plastic bag in the drain, the pile on the roadside to notice the problem. Often there is little to no conversation about hazardous waste , even though its impact is large. This problem is not just concentrated in industrial and urban region. Assam’s oil and petrochemical sector, pharmaceutical manufacturing, and a growing constellation of research institutions including CSIR-NEIST, NIPER Guwahati, and Universities across the region all generate waste streams governed by the Hazardous and Other Wastes (Management and Transboundary Movement) Rules, 2016.
This year’s World Environment Day theme is not incidental to waste management it is central to it. Decomposing organic waste in open landfills is a major source of methane, a greenhouse gas far more potent than carbon dioxide in the short term. Open burning of municipal and agricultural waste contributes substantially to black carbon and particulate matter, with particular impact on regional air quality and glacier and snowpack systems in the Himalayan-Northeast corridor.
Conversely, responsible waste management is a genuine climate solution. Composting and biomethanisation of organic waste reduce landfill methane. Material recovery reduces the energy demand of manufacturing virgin materials. Landfill gas capture can generate electricity. These are not distant, expensive technologies many are appropriate for the scale of Nagaland’s towns, if the institutional will and funding exist to deploy them.
What Needs to Change
Nagaland’s waste crisis is solvable, but not through awareness campaigns alone. The defunct waste treatment infrastructure must be reactivated, not through further studies, but through accountable, time-bound implementation plans with officials responsible for delivery. Rural waste, which goes entirely untracked in current reporting, must be brought into the policy framework before it compounds into a crisis larger than the urban one. What is needed is not more rules, but the institutional will to make existing rules a lived reality in Nagaland’s towns and villages, not just on paper in Kohima.
The Signal We Send
Protecting ecosystem requires more than sorting waste at the kitchen door. It requires completing the chain: from the household, through collection, through processing, through responsible final disposal.
On this World Environment Day, the signal the Northeast can choose to send is not a social media post or a pledge at a function. It is the demand from citizens, civil society, and elected representatives alike that its citizens are protected and that the environment does not end where the bin is sealed.
Waste does not become environmentally neutral the moment it leaves our hands. Our responsibility travels with it.
The author, a Member of the Royal Society of Biology (MRSB), has a background in scientific research and currently works in the field of institutional waste treatment and environmental engineering.
She is associated with Mc Clelland Engineers Pvt. Ltd., an Indian company that designs CPCB-compliant incinerator systems across India and world wide.
