Last week, around 9pm on Saturday, I was driving along the Golf Course Extension Road when I decided to stop near a large vacant plot. The place was quiet, but within minutes, I saw cars pull up one after another. Residents rolled down their windows and tossed polybags filled with waste, turning it into a roadside dump. Some didn’t even bother to get out—the bags landed with a dull thud before they sped away. Watching this, I couldn’t help but wonder: if residents are themselves adding to the filth, who should we really hold accountable?
For months, I have reported on Gurugram’s sanitation crisis. The Municipal Corporation of Gurugram (MCG) is often at the receiving end of residents’ anger—piles of waste left uncleared, poor monitoring of contractors, and illegal dumping in open areas. The frustration is understandable, and social media is flooded with pictures and videos of garbage heaps. But that night, I decided to speak to some of the very residents I saw dumping waste. Their response was startlingly candid: “We are working people, we leave early and come home late. We don’t get time to hand over garbage to the vendor. At night, this is the only option.”
Their honesty reflected a reality I had often overlooked while reporting from the outside. People who live in high-rises and gated societies, who demand world-class infrastructure and complain about poor civic services, are sometimes just as responsible for the problem.
In recent months, I have also seen foreign nationals, embarrassed by the condition of the streets around their homes, stepping out to clear garbage themselves and posting about it online. Residents demand action from authorities but, at the same time, casually fling waste into open plots. The contradiction is hard to ignore.
Sanitation in a city is not just the job of the civic body. It is a collective discipline. And yet, in Gurugram, accountability has become a pass-the-buck game—residents blame MCG, MCG blames contractors, and contractors point fingers back at residents. The result is a city that aspires to be “world-class” but struggles to manage something as basic as waste.
I have been covering sanitation in Gurugram for months now, and each time I step out, I find myself circling back to the same question: when it comes to waste management, who is really responsible—the system, or us?
(Leena Dhankhar heads the Gurugram bureau, and has extensively covered civic issues, forests, real estate and politics)