#18: Why Over 50% of India’s Waste-to-Energy Plants Have Already Shut Down?
In fact, only around 47% of collected waste is processed, about 27% is officially landfilled, and a staggering 25% of all trash isn’t accounted for at all - often just dumped or burned in the open.
India’s grand experiment with waste-to-energy (WTE) plants is literally turning to waste.
Over half of these facilities are either shut down or lying idle, stark evidence that the promise of turning garbage into power has faltered. This is happening even as India faces a mounting waste crisis.
The country generates about 1.5 lakh tonnes of solid waste every day, but less than half is treated.
In fact, only around 47% of collected waste is processed, about 27% is officially landfilled, and a staggering 25% of all trash isn’t accounted for at all - often just dumped or burned in the open.
WTE plants were supposed to be a silver bullet for this mess. Instead, many have ended up as expensive, smoke-belching white elephants.
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Since 1987, 15 WTE plants have been set up across India, and 7 of them have already shut down. The ones still running operate well below capacity.
The failure rate is alarming, and it forces a hard look at why these projects are not delivering.
The fundamental problem is the garbage itself.
India’s municipal waste is simply not suited for energy extraction in incinerators.
It’s often been said that trying to incinerate India’s mixed waste is like attempting to burn damp tissue paper. That’s not far from the truth.
Most Indian cities collect waste in an unsegregated heap - a soggy blend of kitchen scraps, plastics, paper, dust, and whatnot. More than half of it is organic and moisture-heavy.
Measurements show our municipal solid waste has a low calorific value, around 1.4k-2.15k kcal/kg on average, barely reaching the 1.5k-1.8k kcal/kg threshold needed for efficient combustion.
In contrast, countries that successfully run WTE incinerators - say Sweden or Germany - deal with mostly dry, high-calorie waste (often >2k kcal/kg).
What goes into Indian incinerators, by and large, is too wet to burn on its own. Several of India’s WTE projects collapsed for exactly this reason.
The low energy content of mixed waste was the death knell for plants in Vijayawada, Bengaluru, Kanpur, Hyderabad, Lucknow, and Karimnagar - all of which shut down after being unable to sustain combustion.
Yet, policy-makers forged ahead regardless: back in 2007, the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) even told the Supreme Court that WTE plants “can function on un-segregated waste,” a claim that ground reality has proven tragically wrong.
Economics have been an equally crippling issue. Power from waste in India is very costly.
Despite heavy subsidies, WTE electricity is priced around ₹7 per kWh, which is about double the cost of power from coal or solar plants.
This makes it unattractive for power distribution companies to purchase.
The high cost stems from the small scale and inefficiencies - WTE incinerators are generally 5–25 MW each, far less efficient than large power stations.
They also have high operating and maintenance expenses.
As a result, many plants depend on tipping fees and other payments to stay afloat.
Municipal bodies typically pay a tipping fee per tonne of waste delivered to the plant as part of the public-private partnership model.
But this has created a perverse incentive: since the fee is paid on quantity, not quality, operators actually prefer receiving heavy, wet, unsegregated waste.
The more mixed garbage trucks they weigh in, the more money they earn - even though water-logged waste yields less energy.
This “pay by the ton” approach means there’s little incentive to insist on source segregation.
On the contrary, some WTE operators have been happy to incinerate as much unsegregated refuse as possible just to maximise fees, while most of the waste’s energy value literally goes up in smoke.
It’s a lose-lose situation: financially strained city administrations pay out crores in tipping fees, yet get very little electricity in return. And if those subsidies or fees stop, the plant often can’t survive.
Essentially, the business model has been propped up by public money, while the underlying economics remain unviable.
Policy and governance gaps underlie these failures.
India’s waste management rules on paper emphasise exactly what the WTE sector lacks - segregation and preprocessing.
The Solid Waste Management Rules 2016, for instance, mandate source segregation and say only non-recyclable waste with sufficient calorific value (>1.5k kcal/kg) should be used for energy recovery.
In practice, enforcement of these rules is weak to non-existent in most cities.
Municipal authorities have struggled to implement door-to-door segregated collection.
Instead, most cities continue with a one-bin system, dumping mixed garbage into trucks and onto landfills.
Faced with overflowing dumpsites, city officials often grab at WTE projects as a quick fix - a single contract that promises to make the waste “disappear.”
Indeed, many municipalities find it easier to sign a deal with a WTE company and hand over all their waste than to develop the harder, ground-up solution of segregating and processing waste streams separately.
The result is that WTE plants keep getting a feedstock they cannot handle properly.
The informal sector does pick out some recyclables before waste reaches the incinerator, but what remains still includes 40-60% organic matter and other damp, inert material.
This not only lowers the plant’s efficiency but also means a lot of the input ends up as char, ash, or unburnt rejects that have to be landfilled anyway.
Another governance issue is poor planning and oversight.
Many WTE projects were approved without securing proper grid connections or power purchase agreements in advance, leading to situations where electricity was generated but not effectively evacuated to the grid.
In some cases, environmental clearances and social acceptance were afterthoughts.
Plants were pushed through despite community opposition, only to be dragged into courts later.
When violations occur, accountability is murky.
There have been dozens of court cases against WTE operators over pollution and contract breaches, but penalties have been sporadic.
An analysis noted that several plants were found non-compliant with emissions norms and even issued show-cause notices, yet they continued operating until they eventually broke down.
Municipal bodies, for their part, rarely face consequences for failing to supply quality waste or for lapses in oversight.
This lack of institutional accountability means the cycle of setting up and shutting down WTE plants keeps repeating with few lessons learned.
The story on the ground - city by city - reflects these shortcomings in vivid detail.
Take the national capital, Delhi, which has bet big on incineration.
Delhi generates roughly 10k-11k tonnes of solid waste each day (a figure rising yearly) and has three large WTE plants in operation.
These are located at Okhla, Ghazipur and Narela-Bawana, together claimed to produce about 52 MW of power.
They consume around 5k-6k tonnes of waste per day, mainly the mixed refuse collected from across the city.
Even so, Delhi’s three landfills remain gigantic - over half the city’s daily waste still ends up in dumpsites or as litter.
The WTE plants have not eliminated the garbage mountains; at best they’ve shaved off a portion.
And they’ve introduced new environmental problems.
The Okhla WTE plant, for example, has been deeply controversial since its inception.
It was built in 2011 in the heart of South Delhi, adjacent to residential areas.
From day one, residents complained of toxic emissions and ash.
Over a million people live within a few kilometres of this plant, and many have reported foul smells, respiratory illnesses, and other health issues they link to the facility.
Doctors at a nearby hospital noted a rise in asthma cases since the plant started operating.
Residents have staged protests, filed petitions, and even threatened to boycott elections if authorities don’t act.
The plant was taken to the National Green Tribunal (NGT) for violating emission norms, and in 2016 the NGT imposed a ₹25 lakh fine on the Okhla WTE operator for polluting the environment.
Continuous emission monitoring systems were installed under orders, but assessments found they were often malfunctioning or the data was being fudged.
In spite of these issues, the Okhla incinerator is now expanding - from 16 MW to 40 MW capacity - provoking even more public ire.
Delhi’s government insists that WTE is necessary to tackle the garbage crisis, pointing out that these plants together divert a big chunk of waste that would otherwise be dumped.
It’s true that about 80% of Delhi’s “processed” waste is handled via incineration, an unusually high share.
But this statistic is a double-edged sword: it also means the city is burning a lot of potentially recyclable or compostable material that ideally should never have been set on fire.
Meanwhile, the toxic fly ash and bottom ash from the incinerators still have to be landfilled, and the city’s soil and air bear the burden.
Delhi’s experience shows that without proper segregation and emission control, WTE plants can simply swap one problem (landfills) for another (air pollution and toxic ash).
Now consider Hyderabad, which until recently had no large WTE plant and relied mainly on landfills.
In 2021, Hyderabad inaugurated a new incineration-based WTE facility at its Jawahar Nagar dump site, with a capacity of about 24 MW (processing roughly 1.2k-1.5k TPD of waste).
A second plant of similar size is under construction at the same location, aiming to double the capacity to ~48 MW and handle more of the city’s garbage.
On paper, this sounds like progress - Hyderabad generating electricity from its waste and reducing the load on its sprawling landfill.
The Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) even touted the WTE plant as a “success story” and organised tours for officials from other states to learn from it.
Recently, a team from Chennai was shown the Jawahar Nagar plant as a model for a proposed Chennai project.
But residents living around the Hyderabad WTE plant paint a very different picture.
A joint fact-finding report by local activists in 2025 revealed that people within an 8 km radius of the Jawahar Nagar incinerator suffer constant foul odour and fine ash settling on their homes.
The fine particulate ash blankets furniture and clothes, and residents blame it for aggravating asthma, skin diseases, kidney ailments and other chronic health problems.
The report also documented severe water pollution: leachate from the adjacent landfill and possibly ash from the plant have contaminated nearby water bodies.
Groundwater tests showed total dissolved solids 20 times higher than permissible limits in the vicinity - a sign of heavy pollution likely by waste runoff.
Perhaps most alarming, the investigation found that the plant operator was simply dumping fly ash and other toxic residues on top of the landfill, instead of safely disposing it in a secure landfill as required.
“The company is not complying with the regulations,” a local resident said, pointing out the ash mountains accumulating nearby.
Uncovered garbage trucks going to the plant add to air pollution, and even government-built housing is just a few hundred metres from the site.
This scenario is eerily similar to Delhi’s Okhla saga - just that it’s unfolding in Hyderabad now.
The promised “state-of-the-art” operation looks, on ground, like the same old story of regulatory shortcuts and community exposure to toxins.
Hyderabad’s WTE venture might be reducing the visible garbage on the streets, but it’s shifting the burden onto the health of nearby communities - an outcome that residents are now vocally protesting.
In Chennai (Tamil Nadu), meanwhile, WTE is at a crossroads.
Tamil Nadu has historically not had big WTE incinerators in its major cities, but that’s changing.
The state government has proposed large WTE plants for Chennai and other cities like Coimbatore and Madurai.
Chennai Corporation is moving forward with a plan to set up a 21 MW waste-to-energy plant at the Kodungaiyur dumpsite in North Chennai - a facility designed to burn 2.1k tonnes of garbage per day once operational.
Notably, the private firm tapped to build and run this plant is the same one operating Hyderabad’s Jawahar Nagar WTE.
This has set off alarm bells among Chennai’s residents and even some local councillors.
Having seen the reports from Hyderabad, community groups in Chennai are strongly opposing the Kodungaiyur project.
They fear it will bring similar pollution to an area already choking from decades of waste dumping.
Their concerns are backed by global trends too: as critics point out, even developed countries are moving away from mass-burn incinerators due to environmental and health concerns.
There’s public memory of past failures as well - for instance, a small 10-tonne-a-day pilot incinerator in Chennai’s Manali area had to be shut after it caused cadmium contamination in the environment at levels 24 times above WHO limits.
With that context, Chennai’s citizens argue that investing in a giant new WTE plant is dangerous and “another environmental disaster in the making.”
The pushback in Chennai underscores a broader pattern: communities across India are no longer willing to accept polluting waste projects in their backyard without a fight.
From Okhla to Kerala to Karnataka, residents have increasingly been voicing NIMBY (“Not In My Backyard”) protests - not out of ignorance, but often after experiencing real harm from these facilities.
On the other hand, some cities have taken different paths that offer instructive contrasts.
Bengaluru, for example, has had a tumultuous history with waste management but has recently emphasised decentralised solutions over big incinerators.
The city’s earlier attempt at a WTE plant failed due to wet-waste issues.
In the late 2010s, Bengaluru floated tenders for several new WTE plants, but none of those proposals took off - contractors missed deadlines, faced protests, or backed out.
By 2020-2023, the Karnataka government finally cancelled at least four planned WTE projects around Bengaluru after they stalled and could not meet conditions.
Instead of insisting on incineration, Bengaluru’s strategy shifted to strengthening waste segregation and local processing.
The city established dry waste collection centres in each ward, scaled up composting for wet waste, and engaged the informal recycler network.
An expert pointed out that this focus on segregation is why “Bengaluru is doing far better than Delhi” in waste management outcomes.
Bengaluru still struggles with garbage - old landfills around the city are an issue, and not all neighbourhoods comply with segregation - but it has avoided adding a new WTE-related air pollution problem on top of that.
Likewise, Pune has largely steered clear of big incinerators.
Pune’s municipal body did plan a WTE plant as early as 2012, but strong opposition from villagers near the proposed site and technical setbacks stalled it.
The project was scaled down and moved to an industrial area, but even there it floundered.
The first contractor could not generate any electricity - they only managed to produce some RDF and ended up piling thousands of tonnes of half-burnt waste at the site.
That company eventually quit, citing technical issues. A second contractor was brought in in 2019, but years later, the plant still hadn’t produced power.
After a decade of failures, Pune’s WTE project was essentially a non-starter, resurfacing in the city budget every few years with a new label but little progress.
In the meantime, Pune strengthened other aspects: it has a robust door-to-door collection system run in part by the famed SWaCH cooperative of waste pickers, set up biogas plants for wet waste, and even explored a novel idea to convert waste into hydrogen fuel.
While that hydrogen-from-waste scheme hasn’t gone beyond pilot stage, the point is Pune hasn’t become dependent on incineration - and it continues to look for more sustainable waste-to-resource options.
Other cities like Indore have gained accolades for cleanliness by focusing on composting and bio-CNG.
Indore processes much of its organic waste into cooking gas and fuel for buses.
These examples show that alternatives to the incinerator-centric model can work if the fundamentals of waste segregation and recycling are addressed.
It’s also instructive to see how national policy and investments are evolving in this arena. The government initially pushed WTE incinerators hard as part of the Swachh Bharat Mission (Urban).
NITI Aayog envisaged 800 MW of electricity from WTE by 2018-19 - which was nearly ten times the capacity of all existing plants then. That target was wildly optimistic, and indeed it was nowhere near achieved.
By late 2020, India’s total installed WTE power capacity (from municipal solid waste) was only around 250-300 MW, and that counts plants of varying types.
Real output is even less, given many incinerators operate below capacity or intermittently.
The government had also proposed a dedicated “Waste to Energy Corporation of India” to catalyse projects via public-private partnerships.
However, this idea hasn’t materialised into a visible entity yet - perhaps because the underlying business model remains shaky.
In recent years, there’s been a slight pivot: recognising the problems with mixed waste incineration, policymakers have started promoting bio-energy from segregated organic waste.
The GOBAR-Dhan scheme (announced in Budget 2023) is to establish 500 new “Waste to Wealth” plants focused on biogas and bio-CNG from agricultural and municipal wet waste.
This is a positive move because it targets the largest fraction of our waste (biodegradables) and uses a more appropriate technology than incineration.
Some government-backed projects show promise: for instance, Goa’s state waste management agency set up a successful biomethanation plant that treats 40 tonnes per day of wet waste and generates 0.3 MW of power.
Unlike incinerators, which emit toxic flue gases, this plant uses anaerobic digesters and produces biogas in a controlled manner - a model that could be replicated for other cities’ vegetable markets and food waste.
The central government is also funding compost plants and smaller biogas units in many cities under Swachh Bharat Mission 2.0.
These efforts indicate a recognition that waste-to-energy doesn’t have to mean only burning trash; energy can be recovered in more sustainable ways if waste is sorted.
Still, these initiatives are at an early stage relative to the scale of the problem.
For example, even if all 500 planned GOBAR-Dhan bio-waste plants come up, they will mainly tackle cow dung and market wastes in semi-rural areas - important, but not a total solution for city municipal waste.
The harsh truth is that none of these schemes will fully succeed unless the waste coming in is segregated and free of contaminants.
That one factor - segregation at source - is the linchpin for any waste management strategy, be it composting, biogas, or even incineration of leftovers.
So far, India’s foray into waste-to-energy plants has exposed a simple reality: you can’t shortcut your way out of a garbage crisis.
High-tech incinerators, glossy PPP contracts, and ambitious renewable energy targets meant little when basic governance and ground conditions were ignored.
WTE plants in India have been choking on unsegregated trash, bogged down by high costs, and hounded by pollution concerns.
In effect, we tried to import a technology without importing the preconditions that make it work - a well-segregated waste stream and strict emission control.
The outcome has been predictable - many projects failed, and those running are underperforming and causing new worries.
This doesn’t mean waste-to-energy is entirely futile in India, but it cannot be the first-line solution for our municipal waste problems.
The experience so far shows it should be the last resort - a method to deal with the fraction of waste that truly cannot be recycled or composted.
Currently, only about 15% of India’s waste might fit that description - roughly 30k tonnes per day out of the total waste generated.
Yet, as of 2019, we had planned WTE capacity for 37k+ tonnes/day, essentially overestimating how much burnable waste we have.
This misalignment leads to plants trying to burn what they shouldn’t, or running under capacity. Going forward, a course correction is needed.
First, fix the fundamentals: enforce segregation of wet, dry, and hazardous waste at the source in all cities, through public awareness and strict municipal by-laws.
Without this, any high-end waste technology is likely to fail.
Second, strengthen the waste management chain - expand door-to-door collection, support the recycling industry, and compost or digest the bulk of organic waste which makes up the lion’s share of our trash.
This will drastically cut down the volume that even needs landfilling or incineration.
Third, if incineration-based WTE is to be used for the remaining waste, it must be done in a controlled, regulated manner: only proven technologies, only for appropriate waste fractions, and under continuous emissions monitoring with data transparency.
Plants must be located with proper buffers away from habitation, and the toxic ash residue must be treated as hazardous waste - not casually dumped in the open.
Fourth, realign the incentives in public-private partnerships.
Instead of paying by sheer tonnage of waste delivered, contracts could reward higher energy output or proper environmental compliance.
Also, tie payments to the quality of waste.
Private operators should be held to performance standards under penalty clauses, so that non-performing plants don’t just sit idle while garbage piles up.
Finally, community engagement and oversight are key
Waste facilities anywhere affect local communities, and involving those communities in planning and monitoring can improve accountability and trust.
When residents are treated as stakeholders rather than adversaries, projects are more likely to be designed with stringent safeguards.
Sometimes, the community might rightly reject a bad proposal before it’s built, saving everyone a lot of trouble.
In summary, India’s WTE journey so far offers a cautionary tale brimming with data and hard knocks.
The idea of turning waste to energy is appealing - and in a country drowning in garbage, we do need to find energy or value in waste wherever possible.
But the evidence shows that blindly importing incinerator technology into a context of unsegregated waste, weak enforcement, and eager-but-ill-prepared local bodies is a recipe for failure.
The shutdowns of over half the WTE plants constructed, the below-capacity running of the rest, and the host of environmental violations are symptoms of this mismatch.
Yet, these failures are also an opportunity to learn. They underline that there are no shortcuts in solid waste management.
The basics - reduce, reuse, recycle, and only then recover energy from the small remaining fraction - cannot be skipped.
Policymakers and city leaders must pivot from the quick-fix mentality to a more holistic approach.
Strengthen waste segregation and recycling systems (which also create many jobs in the circular economy), invest in organics-to-biogas for clean energy, and use WTE incineration sparingly with the utmost precautions.
Unless these changes happen, pouring more money into large incinerators will likely just mean pouring fuel on the fire - literally and figuratively.
The vision of swachh, sustainable cities will remain out of reach if we continue down the same path.
It’s time to course-correct, grounded in the hard lessons from the WTE plants that now stand as costly reminders of what not to do.
Each city’s waste challenge might seem overwhelming, but the solution begins at home - in every household sorting their trash - and ends with accountable institutions that make sure yesterday’s garbage doesn’t become tomorrow’s environmental nightmare.
Much thanks to the support from good folks at Zero1 by Zerodha, making the research for this newsletter possible.
Best,
Jayant Mundhra
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References
https://www.cppr.in/articles/the-failed-ideas-of-waste-to-energy-plants-in-india
https://www.downtoearth.org.in/waste/trash-fired-power-plants-wasted-in-india-63984
https://idronline.org/article/climate-emergency/waste-to-energy-smokescreen-or-solution/
https://medium.com/the-future-is-electric/dead-on-arrival-punes-waste-to-hydrogen-folly-467319e1c4e1
Segregation at home does not work in India due 1) small kitchen size or perhaps just one room homes, 2) necessary discipline to do it. If 1) is the problem, how about building WTE plants that have an optical/gravity/moisture sensor pre segregation module, saving huge amounts of money and time? Isn’t this all about innovation, where India is supposedly 3rd largest in the startup world?
Another solution could be to compress whatever segregated waste (as low in moisture as possible) into pellets that are easy to transport, used in industries as fuel?
Let this business be taught as a module in all colleges - engineering or otherwise - so all students come out as partners in the waste disposal systems.
Lastly, find your wire too long, though interesting. You could squeeze (reduce waste and moisture) by 50%!