Garbage Set Ablaze In Broad Daylight, HC Warning Goes Up In Smoke

Nagpur: In a brazen violation of the solid waste management (SWM) rules, sanitary workers were caught red-handed burning heaps of swept garbage in Friends Colony on Friday, exposing the Nagpur Municipal Corporation's (NMC) weak enforcement and token penalties that failed to curb a practice rampant across the city.Thick plumes of smoke engulfed residential lanes as workers allegedly chose to torch collected waste instead of transporting it to designated lifting points. As per civic norms, each sanitary worker is assigned a 500–900 metre stretch and is required to gather waste at a specified spot for collection. Instead, burning — the quickest and cheapest shortcut — continued unchecked.The Nagpur Bench of the Bombay High Court earlier took suo motu cognisance of a similar garbage burning case following a TOI report. The court's intervention was expected to send a strong message. Years later, little changed on the ground.Yogita Khan, a resident of CPWD Colony, spotted the workers setting garbage on fire and alerted the NMC's SWM department. "It is rampant inside CPWD Colony as well. Despite repeated complaints, no serious action is taken," she said. Attempts to contact Junior Engineer (CPWD) Rishi Soni went unanswered.Senior officials in the SWM department conceded that the penalty for such violations is a mere Rs 500 if a worker is caught. "Whenever we catch anyone, including sanitary workers, we impose a fine," an officer said. Critics argued that the negligible fine neither reflected the environmental damage nor acted as a deterrent.Civic officials admitted off the record that garbage burning is not restricted to 1 locality. "It is rampant across city limits," an officer said, pointing to systemic enforcement failure.Data from the Nuisance Detection Squad (NDS) revealed only 357 cases of garbage burning were booked between January 1, 2018, and February 27, 2026, with Rs 4.42 lakh collected in fines. In 2022 alone, 110 cases were recorded. In 2025, just 15 cases were booked, and 4 more in the first 2 months of 2026.For a city where residents routinely reported smoke from burning waste, these figures appeared grossly understated. Environmentalists said hundreds of such incidents went unrecorded, with no penal action taken.Even where violations were detected — like at CPWD Colony, identified earlier as a Garbage Vulnerable Point — responsibility remained blurred. On Friday, the NDS issued a notice to the sweeper contractor, but no accountability was fixed on CPWD officials. Civic authorities admitted they had limited powers to penalise central govt establishments.As toxic smoke continued to choke neighbourhoods, the gap between rulebooks and reality grew wider — and enforcement remained little more than a formality.