Municipal solid waste · CPCB / SBM-U · state & UT
Every state is a square. The square fills from the bottom with the share of its daily waste that is not processed — the fraction that ends up in a landfill, a legacy dumpsite, or nowhere anyone has counted. Tap a square.
Colour = tonnes per day generated. Fill height = unprocessed share.
| State / UT | Generated | To land | Processed |
|---|
Nationally, generation minus treatment leaves roughly 80,000 TPD unaccounted for, but only about 29,000 TPD is reported as landfilled. The difference is not a rounding error — it is waste going to unengineered dumpsites, informal recovery, or simply never entering the ledger. Any state whose "landfilled" figure is small while its processing rate is low should be read as a data gap, not a success.
Several states report installed capacity well above what actually runs. Plants sit at half load because incoming waste is mixed, and mixed waste breaks compost quality and calorific value alike. Segregation at source is the binding constraint, not tonnage of capacity — only a handful of states report anything close to full segregation.
Roughly 3,184 dumpsites hold decades of accumulated waste, concentrated in Uttar Pradesh (609), Madhya Pradesh (326), Maharashtra (237), Tamil Nadu (210) and Rajasthan (197). Bio-mining and remediation targets under SBM-U 2.0 address this stock; the tile map above only shows the daily flow. A state can look adequate on flow and still be sitting on a mountain.
Indian municipal waste runs above 50% wet organics with high moisture, so anaerobic decomposition begins early and landfill gas builds fast. Uncapped sites vent methane continuously and catch fire in the pre-monsoon months. Captured instead, national landfill gas represents on the order of 5,000–14,000 MW of generation potential.
Studies of north Indian sites find elevated ammoniacal nitrogen, COD and chloride in groundwater within 1 km of dumpsites. This is the concern that most often decides siting disputes, and the one least visible in tonnage dashboards.
Landfills sited on city edges thirty years ago are now surrounded by dense settlement, which is how Deonar, Ghazipur and Dadumajra became political problems rather than engineering ones. New capacity is pushed further out, raising haulage cost and carbon, while the old sites remain because closure is expensive and nobody wants the replacement.