By Imlisanen Jamir
On March 31, the Dimapur Municipal Council issued a press release granting its existing dumping site one final month of operation. No further extensions will be granted. Arrangements will be made. The public is advised to cooperate.
It is worth pausing over that word, cooperate. Citizens of Dimapur have been cooperating for years. They have watched trucks collect their waste and deposit it at a site that has been groaning under fifty lakh metric tonnes of legacy garbage accumulated across decades. They have read the notifications, attended the awareness drives, listened to the speeches about segregation and sustainability and the coming transformation of their city. And they have gone on watching the drains fill up and the roadsides acquire their familiar coat of refuse, because cooperation, however earnest, cannot substitute for a functioning system.
The DMC's March 31 notification is not, on its face, unreasonable. A dumping site that has long exceeded its capacity cannot be kept open indefinitely on the strength of humanitarian appeals and administrative inertia. The East Dimapur Town Council's alarm is also entirely reasonable. It has no designated waste disposal site of its own, which is not an oversight but a structural failure that predates this crisis by several years. The Solid Waste Management Rules are explicit on this point: every Urban Local Body must maintain its own designated facility. EDTC has been operating without one, apparently without consequence, until the DMC's closure notice made the omission impossible to ignore any longer.
This is the pattern that repeats itself in Nagaland's waste management with the reliability of the monsoon. Rules are framed and left unenforced. Facilities are built and left non-functional. A Rs 48.63 crore processing plant in Kohima has sat idle while the city's garbage goes on accumulating. The Comptroller and Auditor General documented all of this with the careful neutrality of a man describing a slow flood, and the state government's response was to note that a short-term plan had been approved in June 2023, which was precisely when the audit had already begun. The timing was not ironic. It was typical.
What Dimapur faces on May 1, if the DMC holds to its word and the alternative arrangements remain as vague as they currently appear to be, is not a waste management problem in the administrative sense. It is a city that has reached the end of a long exercise in postponement. The trucks will continue to collect waste from ninety-six colonies. The waste will have nowhere to go. The notices warning against illegal dumping will be printed and displayed, and people will dump beside them, because that is what happens in a city that has learned, through long experience, that the consequences threatened in official communications rarely arrive.
A deadline that exists without a destination is not a solution. It is the previous problem wearing a different date.
Comments can be sent to imlisanenjamir@gmail.com
