Garbage 'chokes' Gurugram as sanitation workers' strike enters second week

Sanitation workers have effectively held Gurugram to ransom, with garbage now spilling onto roads across the city’s oldest and most municipally-dependent pockets as their strike, called by the Nagarpalika Karamchari Sangh Haryana, stretches into a second week with no resolution in sight.

Old Gurugram is bearing the worst of it. Sadar Bazaar, Sectors 4, 7, 14, 15 and 17, Shivaji Nagar, Khandsa Road and the Wazirabad belt — along with several surrounding rural villages that fall within MCG limits — are among the areas worst hit, with garbage no longer confined to designated collection points but now spilling directly onto roads and lanes.

Notably, the door-to-door waste collectors are contractual employees and are not officially part of the union’s strike call. However, many have reportedly joined the agitation in solidarity, leaving large parts of the city without regular collection. With no one lifting household waste for days, increasingly desperate residents in several colonies have themselves begun dumping garbage on roadsides and vacant plots — turning what began as a workers’ protest into a full-blown civic crisis largely of the city’s own making.

The strike began on August 6 amid heavy rain, with sanitation workers, sewermen and firemen-drivers launching what was originally billed as a three-day stir, following a protest at the old Municipal Corporation office led by unit president Basant Kumar and unit secretary Dharmendra Jinghala. The union has since extended the strike till August 15, alleging the government has failed to implement an agreement reached on May 13.

Among the union’s 17-point charter is a demand for regular recruitment against long-vacant sanitation and sewerman posts — an admission, in effect, that MCG’s own frontline strength has been thin even before the strike hit. Other demands include regularisation of contractual staff, a minimum wage of ₹15,200, a ₹5,000 risk allowance, and reinstatement of 3,480 employees retrenched in Gurugram.

The agitation entered its fourth day with a fresh protest announced for August 10 in Karnal, underlining that the pushback has gone well beyond Gurugram.

With MCG’s regular workforce off the job and its contractual door-to-door staff thinning out by the day, the corporation finds itself trying to hold the fort with a fraction of its usual strength. Unless a resolution emerges before the union’s August 15 deadline, the city faces the real prospect of the stir hardening into an indefinite strike repeating a cycle Gurugram has now lived through virtually every year since 2023.