A thick layer of toxic smoke blanketed New Delhi, with residents complaining of breathing issues. It comes after the Ghazipur landfill in the capital burst into flames on Sunday, causing dangerous heat and methane emissions and adding to India’s growing climate challenges.

India’s capital choked on toxic fumes Tuesday as a thick and pungent haze spread from a fire at one of the country’s largest trash mounds, the latest in a series of landfill blazes that authorities have struggled for years to bring under control.

The Ghazipur landfill, which takes up more than 40 football fields and rises to a height of 65m in New Delhi, caught fire on Sunday evening amid soaring temperatures in the region. It caused dangerous heat and methane emissions and added to India’s growing climate challenges.

By Tuesday, the blaze at the capital’s largest landfill had largely been put out, but local media reported that people living nearby complained of throat and eye irritation due to lingering acrid air.

“We are unable to keep our eyes open due to irritation and are experiencing difficulty breathing,” Ram Kumar, a resident of nearby Gharoli village, told NDTV news channel.

The cause of the fire remains unknown. It is not uncommon for the landfill to catch fire that lasts days, especially during India’s rapidly intensifying heatwaves that make such methane-rich landfills highly combustible.

The landfill last caught a major fire during the deadly 2022 heatwave. In 2018, part of the mound had collapsed, killing two people.

The trash mountain at Ghazipur is just one of some 3,000 Indian landfills overflowing with decaying waste and emitting hazardous gases, according to a 2023 report from the Centre for Science and Environment, a nonprofit research agency in New Delhi. The landfill is nearly as tall as the historic Taj Mahal and is an eyesore that towers over surrounding homes, harming residents’ health.

Harjeet Singh, global engagement director of Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty and a climate activist, who lives close to the Ghazipur landfill says the repeated fires on the site are a proof that “our cities are crumbling under the weight of their own waste”.

“The recent fire at the Ghazipur landfill in Delhi is a glaring testament to how our development model has gone disastrously wrong,” he told The Independent.

“This toxic ‘mountain’, built from decades of unchecked urban waste, not only chokes our skies but also emits methane – a potent accelerator of climate change – into our atmosphere.”

Exposure to methane can aggravate lung diseases, cause asthma, and increase the risk of stroke, according to the non-profit Global Clean Air Initiative.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, which is in opposition in Delhi, slammed the state’s leader Arvind Kejriwal, who is currently jailed on corruption charges, for his administration’s “failure” to clean up the landfill.

“The Delhi government has failed,” said BJP spokesperson RP Singh. “They claimed to clear the landfill by December 2023. But they are corrupt and indulge in internal conflicts. They don’t care about Delhi.”

The Ghazipur landfill was opened in 1894 and reached its capacity in 2002. But it is still growing, with more than 2,300 metric tonnes of solid waste arriving at the dump every day, according to a July 2022 report by a committee tasked with reducing fires there.