Ggm sinks in garbage as sanitation workers flee

Gurugram’s gated luxury and glassy towers now stand amid rotting garbage. A quiet exodus is unfolding beneath the city’s gleaming skyline, one that threatens to paralyse its already fragile waste management system.

- Leena Dhankhar

Hundreds of domestic workers and sanitation staff—many of them Bengali-speaking migrants—have fled the city in recent days, gripped by fear amid a police verification and detention drive. The fallout is swift and visible -- garbage piling up in residential sectors, door-to-door collection systems collapsing, and residents scrambling to manage waste on their own.

From Sector 103 to Palam Vihar, Sectors 56, 57, Golf Course Extension Road, Gurugram-Faridabad Road, Sector 29 and new developing sectors, streets are lined with garbage bags.

Housing societies are hiring tractor-trolleys to transport waste to dumping points, often without trained staff or segregation systems—resulting in indiscriminate dumping that threatens to tip Gurugram into a full-blown health emergency.

“They didn't even inform us. Many just vanished overnight out of fear,” said Richa Vohra, a waste volunteer in Sector 57.

The sense of panic is real. Residents and activists say the mass departure stems from a series of detentions targeting Bengali-speaking informal workers. Between July 13 and 21, at least 100 individuals—many employed as house helps or garbage collectors—were allegedly picked up by police.

Five were later released, reportedly after being instructed to board trains to Assam. The status of the others remains unclear.

“They were not even allowed to go home and fetch their Aadhaar cards. The police just dragged them into vans,” said a relative of 45-year-old garbage collector Anwar Hussain, whose family members were among those detained.

According to residents, the detainees are Indian citizens—some of whom have lived in Gurugram for more than five years. Their only apparent offence: the language they speak and the region they come from.

Collapse of a fragile system