Where India's waste lands

Every city reports how much waste it collects. Rather fewer can say where it ended up.

Municipal solid waste is measured at three points: generated, processed, and left over. The third number is the one that matters, because residue becomes a landfill, and a landfill becomes a legacy site that costs many times more to remediate than it would have cost to process the waste.

State reporting to the CPCB makes the gap between generation and processing visible. It also shows how much of the reported processing capacity is actually operating.

What we measure

These are the indicators this topic is built from. Each names its source and the year that source refers to, because an official figure is not the same thing as a current one.

Indicator	Unit	Source and year
Municipal solid waste generated	tonnes per day	CPCB / SBM-UrbanData year: 2023-24 annual report
Waste processed	tonnes per day and % of generated	CPCB / SBM-UrbanData year: 2023-24 annual report
Residue to landfill	tonnes per day	CPCB / SBM-UrbanData year: 2023-24 annual report
Legacy waste sites	count and area	SBM-UrbanData year: 2026 (live dashboard)

What we publish

A state map of generation, processing and residue, with the processing gap as the headline. Live now.

Where these numbers come from

How we handle gaps

Where a source has not reported for a recent year, the gap is shown as a gap. We do not interpolate to make a series look continuous or a map look complete. Where two agencies publish different figures for the same thing, both appear and we say which is which.

Reuse

Charts from this topic may be reused with credit to DataSpeaks and to the original source named above. The underlying data remains under its own licence — most Government of India datasets permit reuse with attribution, some survey microdata does not.