India, March 5 -- Environment minister Manjinder Singh Sirsa's 12-month timeline for flattening the Bhalswa landfill faces multiple challenges, as the project started five years ago has encountered multiple deadline revisions and delays.

Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) officials overseeing the project said that three landfill sites-Okhla, Bhalswa and Ghazipur-cumulatively held 24 million tonnes of legacy waste in 2019 and that progress of biomining the waste has been slow.

According to the MCD status report, as of December 2024, 14.8 million tonnes of legacy waste was cleared through biomining but continued fresh waste dumping kept the total waste at 16.15 million tonnes of garbage.

The biomining of three dump sites was started in...