Shimla’s hidden crisis: The trash trouble beneath tourist gloss

Shimla still carries the storybook charm of the “Queen of Hills” — its winding lanes shaded by deodar trees, ridge views worthy of postcards and a colonial legacy that tourists flock to year after year. But scratch beneath the pretty facade, and another story emerges — one that smells less of pine and more of piled-up waste.

Solid waste management, once an invisible back-end task for civic bodies, is now at the very core of whether Himalayan towns can survive the next decade. In Shimla’s case, the answer is uncomfortable: we are not ready.

The daily dirt — Shimla’s waste in numbers

Every single day, Shimla churns out around 107.75 tonnes of waste — 59 tonnes wet waste; 43 tonnes dry waste; and five tonnes inert and ignored.

The Municipal Corporation manages to collect about 95% of this using mechanical vehicles. On paper, segregation looks promising — around 80% of households comply. Wet waste is picked up three days a week, dry waste on the other three.

There’s a waste-to-energy (WtE) plant that converts 70–80 tonnes into refuse-derived fuel (RDF) for cement factories. Wet waste is composted or sent to gausadans (cow shelters) for feed. A bio-methanation plant is in the works.

Sounds neat? Look closer — the WtE plant’s power generation unit doesn’t work, cement companies aren’t always interested in our RDF and transport costs eat away at the budget. In reality, we’re often just shipping our problem elsewhere.

Copy-paste policies in a mountain town

From the 2016 Solid Waste Management Rules to Swachh Bharat Mission 2.0, most waste policies are designed for the plains. In Shimla, narrow hill roads, sudden landslides and limited land make them unfit. Garbage trucks can’t even reach some neighbourhoods.

Even worse, Shimla has no engineered sanitary landfill. Waste ends up in dumping sites alarmingly close to forests, rivers and aquifers — like Annadale and Dhalli — where leachate pollutes groundwater and wildlife picks through the debris.

Unsung heroes nobody pays

It’s not the official system but the informal sector that keeps Shimla from drowning in waste. Local waste pickers, recyclers and gausadans repurpose about 5–6 tonnes of food waste daily, often without recognition, rights, or proper pay. Material recovery facilities handle just 1–1.5 tonnes of dry waste a day. The rest is salvaged by this invisible workforce — saving the environment while struggling to survive.

All policy, no practice

Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) — meant to make companies responsible for the waste they generate — barely exists in action. Few producers are registered, enforcement is weak and there’s no real system for tracking plastics or fining violators. The result? Polluters profit, hill towns choke.

If the queen can’t cope, who can?

Shimla’s 2024–25 budget allocated Rs 14.15 crore to solid waste management — 9% of MCS’s total — but only Rs 3.3 crore for landfill development. The rest goes into operating and maintaining a broken system.

What the city really needs is mountain-specific solutions: Decentralised processing units in each ward; an engineered landfill in a safe location; technology adapted to small hill towns, not just metros; inclusion and protection of informal workers; and fiscal transparency and political will

Because if Shimla — with its resources, tourist revenue and administrative legacy — is struggling, smaller Himalayan towns are in even deeper trouble. The postcard image of the “Queen of Hills” will mean little if the crown is buried under a heap of garbage.

(Tikender Singh Panwar is former Deputy Mayor of Shimla and Aseem Acharya is an urban specialist and expert on waste management.)