Chennai’s garbage has an address. When you enter the Kodungaiyur neighbourhood, you notice the smell first. It hangs in the air, settles into homes, and intensifies when it rains. Then you see it.
The mountain of waste at the Greater Chennai Corporation’s (GCC) sprawling Kodungaiyur dumpyard looms over the homes on Thondiarpet High Road, with its constant, inescapable presence. Nearly every household lives within sight of it. The Kodungaiyur Canal struggles to carry murky water to the Buckingham Canal. On the other side, the Captain Cotton Canal is equally choked and burdened.
3,000-litre plastic water tanks stand at street corners, one shared by up to ten families, for drinking, cooking, bathing, and every other daily need. The water in the wells is unusable as it carries the same stench that hangs in the Kodungaiyur air.
“When it rains, the stench is unbearable. Even otherwise, the nights feel suffocating. The dumping hasn’t stopped. If anything, the volume has only increased,” says 52-year-old Kamatchi, who lives on 4th Cross Street near Agasthyar Street.
As Tamil Nadu approaches the 2026 Assembly elections and political parties foreground development in their campaigns, these neighbourhoods reveal a long-standing pattern: essential services lag behind while polluting infrastructure is concentrated here, raising questions about who benefits from urban growth and who continues to bear its costs.
‘Nothing changes’
Water scarcity remains a long-standing, unresolved problem for residents. “We don’t have piped connections in our homes. There’s one common tank for about ten families. We carry water from there for everything. Some of us buy drinking water. Rs 20 for a can and Rs 15 for a pot. Whenever there is a pipe break, sewage mixes with the supply. We have small wells at home, but in the summer, the water just stinks,” says Lokanayaki, another resident of 4th Cross Street.
Knee-deep waterlogging is normal every rainy season. During floods, the water rises up to three feet along the walls,” says Rani, another resident.
Just three kilometres away from Kodungaiyur is Vyasarpadi, which is also on the banks of the Buckingham Canal. Vyasarpadi faces a similar water crisis.
“Whenever there is flooding, they simply pump the water out. There has been no pipe connection since I started living in this area. The common water pumps on the streets were installed during Jayalalithaa’s time. Even when there is no water stagnation in the rest of Chennai, it collects here and takes days to drain. No matter which party comes to power, nothing changes,” says 58-year-old Jaya from Vyasarpadi.
For many residents, these conditions are not isolated failures but part of a larger pattern of what they describe as the long neglect of north Chennai.
“People here build the city. They repair it. They keep it running. But they don’t have a proper place to live,” says Jaffar, a Vyasarpadi resident. “Their hard work benefits someone else. That is the general attitude towards people from north Chennai. It is exploitation of our labour.”
Speaking about the congested housing board flats with no proper water connections, Dilip, an activist from north Chennai’s Perambur, says, “The government does not build homes. It builds vertical blocks. That is not a home. It is like a jail. People here don’t own even a small piece of land. They are given a tiny space and told this is their house. Their lives are shrunk into a box in the name of development and permanent settlement. And when redevelopment comes, they are asked to move out with no guarantee they will be brought back. People live with the fear of eviction all the time.”
Advocate Mohan Munusamy of Foundation for Friendly Environment and Medical Awareness (FEMA) says, “Dumping the entire city’s waste in one place is social injustice. How can a neighbourhood’s identity be a dumpyard? People who have economic mobility leave this area. Those who stay either cannot afford to move or depend on work here. That is how the pattern continues.”
A promise made on whose backs?
As the DMK seeks re-election in 2026, its manifesto makes an explicit commitment on waste management. Among its 525 promises, the party has pledged that waste-to-energy (WTE) plants will be set up in the Chennai, Tambaram, and Coimbatore corporations.
A part of that promise is already in motion. In February 2025, the GCC proposed a Rs 1,026-crore incinerator at Kodungaiyur for burning 2,100 tonnes of waste daily.
For the DMK, it is a development project that will generate 31 megawatts of electricity from a city's worth of garbage.
For Mohan, who has spent years working with the roughly 40,000 households around the dumpyard, the manifesto clarifies something that was already apparent on the ground. "They pitch it as development," he says. "But development for whom?"
He points to a pattern that has held across governments. Proper civic schemes flow toward other parts of Chennai. Red-category industries – the most polluting – come to north Chennai.
India's pollution control framework classifies industries into colour-coded categories based on their pollution index — a score from 0 to 100 that measures their potential to pollute air, water, and land. Red-category industries have the highest pollution potential. Orange and green categories follow in descending order. White-category industries are considered negligible polluters, exempted from obtaining consent to establish or operate.
Red-category industries face the strictest scrutiny. They must renew their consent annually, install Online Continuous Emission Monitoring Systems (OCEMS), and are subject to more frequent inspections. Incinerators are classified as red-category industries, with a pollution index greater than 60.
The blue category, introduced in 2025 for essential environmental services like sewage treatment plants, municipal waste processing units, and construction and demolition waste plants, is handled differently in the approvals process.
But blue is not a pollution-potential indicator. It is a purely administrative category. Many blue-category facilities have high pollution potential but are classified as blue because they are essential environmental services.
Activists and residents argue that by placing the incinerator under the blue category — which does not carry the same NOC requirements and annual renewal scrutiny as red — the TNPCB has effectively reduced regulatory oversight for one of the most polluting facilities in a neighbourhood that already bears more than its share.
There are close to 50 red-category industries in north Chennai already. The WTE plant, as Mohan sees it, is not a departure from that arrangement. It is the arrangement, formalised into a manifesto promise.
"They couldn't do this in Sholinganallur," he says, "because people there chased them away."
At Sholinganallur, a part of Chennai’s IT hub, residents organised against a proposed incinerator at the Perungudi dumpyard in December 2024. The project has not moved forward after stiff resistance from residents with the time, resources, and connections to make their objections heard.
"Here," says Mohan, "we don't have a political voice or a lobby."
Fire and ash in north Chennai
A smaller incinerator has been operating in Kodungaiyur since 2021 — a 50-tonne-per-day facility run by MAK Controls and Systems Pvt Ltd.
In February 2026, the Alliance for Incinerator Free Chennai and the Federation of North Chennai Residents Welfare Association (FNCRWA) released a fact-finding report on this smaller facility based on RTI data from the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board.
Out of the 48 mandatory environmental parameters the plant is legally required to monitor, 45 (94%) were never tested even once in four years of operation. Of the 11 mandated air emission parameters, nine, including cancer-causing dioxins, furans, and heavy metals, were never tested at all. All 19 parameters for wastewater and leachate went entirely unmonitored. All 13 parameters for the toxicity of bottom ash and fly ash were skipped.
The mandatory OCEMS, which is the real-time pollution tracking device that is supposed to send data to government servers, was never installed.
The plant uses only wet scrubbers, which capture some dust but are incapable of filtering dangerous gases like dioxins and heavy metals. There is no evidence that the furnace reaches the legally required 950°C for complete combustion.
Then there is the ash. The plant was designed to convert its toxic residue into paver blocks –- a detail that has been used, both locally and nationally, to argue that burning mixed waste can be productive.
But an inspection by the TNPCB found the brick-making machinery non-functional. The operating company has provided no documentation on the chemical composition of its ash and no explanation of how it is actually being disposed of.
"Right now, ash is just piled up," says Mohan. "It disperses in the air. When it rains, it dissolves and enters the groundwater table."
The residents of Ezhil Nagar and Netaji Nagar, the neighbourhoods closest to the existing plant, live with these consequences. A survey of 415 residents conducted by FNCRWA found that 77% reported black dust in their water tanks. 79% of the residents found black dust in water stored inside and 67% said dust collected in their home interiors. Nearly half said their electrical appliances frequently malfunction because of the soot. About 80% believed their groundwater was polluted and nearly 48% said it was unfit for drinking.
Headaches, skin rashes, watery eyes, breathlessness, and asthma were reported by many. 76% of respondents attributed their health problems directly to the incinerator’s smoke. Families said doctors advised pregnant women to leave the area until delivery. There are mentions of cancer in the neighbourhood. 42% of children were frequently absent from school due to health issues. Over 45% of working adults said they regularly missed work.
“When we burn things, there are three main by-products: Fire, ash and smoke. The fire is converted to energy. But people here live with smoke in the air. The government says the ashes will be made into bricks. But there are no bricks. They never speak of the environmental and health impacts,” Mohan says.
In 2025, FEMA submitted a detailed alternative waste management plan to the Chief Minister's office. No action was taken.
In May 2025 when FNCRWA organised its 8000-strong human chain protest along a 4.5-kilometre stretch from Ezhil Nagar to Dr Ambedkar Arts College. It was the first time such organised, coordinated resistance had formed against a single infrastructure project in north Chennai.
In the months that followed, FNCRWA met DMK organising secretary RS Bharathi at Anna Arivalayam. They urged them to make cancelling the WTE project a poll promise. The same demand was submitted to AIADMK as well.
Neither party has committed to scrapping the project.
The GCC, responding to the protests in June 2025, issued a letter stating that the construction of the incinerator would only proceed after public consent and environmental clearances were obtained. Mayor R Priya cited a WTE plant near the Eiffel Tower in Paris as evidence that the technology was safe.
What went unsaid was the gap in regulatory capacity between the two cities and the fact that environmental associations and residents in Paris have been fighting the same incinerators. The French authorities ordered one of the furnaces shut down after dioxin exceedances were detected.
Paris, unlike Kodungaiyur, at least has monitoring systems. Meanwhile, the existing 50-tonne plant in Kodungaiyur had tested fewer than 7% of its mandatory environmental parameters over four years.
The technology proposed for Kodungaiyur is one that the rest of the world is reconsidering. The EU has begun withdrawing financial support for new waste incinerators, driven by evidence of their carbon footprint and their tendency to crowd out recycling infrastructure.
The concern is not only about emissions. Globally, such plants have consistently ended up in areas where political resistance is weakest — near poor communities, near communities of colour, and near residents who lack the resources to mount sustained legal challenges. The pattern is recognisable from London to Chennai.
An alternate plan?
The activists pushing back on the Kodungaiyur plant are not asking for the city's waste problem to be ignored. They have put forward a detailed alternative — the Green Chennai Initiative. It proposes to reopen 168 closed Micro Composting Centres and 88 Material Recovery Facilities. It also suggests establishing biogas plants for wet waste and recycling up to 85% of dry waste.
Biomining in the existing dumpyard, which has been underway since 2024, cleared roughly 6 lakh tonnes (about 10% of the legacy waste) as of March 2025. Protesters want that process continued and scaled, not replaced with an incinerator.
The refrain among Kodangaiyur residents is "We don't want the Kodungaiyur dumpyard. And we don't want the incinerator that kills us either.” It carries the weight of four decades of living with the dumpyard and the prospect of living with what could come next.
"The government says the incinerator will create jobs," says Mohan. "But the workers will have to live around it, breathe this air and drink this polluted water."
What the children want
The Confederation of Arunodhaya Children Sangam, a children-led initiative by the Arunodhaya Centre for Street and Working Children in Chennai, also released a manifesto ahead of the 2026 elections.
The children of Thiruvottiyur asked for roadside trees across the area to reduce air pollution from local industries. They also asked for the Kortalaiyar River and local ponds to be desilted and protected from groundwater contamination.
From Dr Radhakrishnan Nagar, children asked for RR Nagar Primary School to be upgraded to a middle school and that teachers trained in child rights be appointed. They also asked for a police outpost in Ambedkar Nagar. And they want the liquor shop near Korukkupet Railway Station to be removed because it makes the walk home from school unsafe.
From Royapuram, the children asked for the 30-year-old underground drainage system in Model Lane to be replaced as it overflows regularly, spilling sewage onto the streets.
They ask for the Buckingham Canal to be continuously desilted to prevent residential flooding and eliminate foul odours. Further, they want child-friendly units with paediatric specialists in Primary Health Centres (PHCs). They also want playgrounds with equipment, small libraries in every locality and government volunteers who ensure every child is enrolled in school.
The children have put this in writing, addressing political parties they cannot yet vote for.
The Arunodhaya manifesto also asks that whenever government committees make decisions that affect children, a child representative must be included as a member. It asks that Children's City Councils receive official recognition. And it asks for the right to be heard in decisions about where they live.