Kishangarh, India – As Bagharam Gurjar kneels to pull weeds from his maize field in western India’s Rajasthan state, the sound of his wife coughing nearby makes him restless. Their village, Bhogiyawas, is just 6km (4 miles) from Kishangarh, where a 300-acre (121-hectare) marble slurry dumping yard resembles a snow-clad landscape, attracting hundreds of tourists every day in an otherwise arid state. Locally known as a “Snow Yard”, the landfill in Rajasthan’s Ajmer district is the largest of its kind in Asia.
Its pristine white hills and slopes with water-filled pits provide a surreal backdrop for visitors, who get free entry to the site. Newlyweds pose against the snowy backdrop or the blue artificial lake, while couples soon to get married organise pre-wedding photoshoots. Social media influencers throng the landfill to make reels.
Music videos and movies are also frequently shot here. Their first impression was that this looks like Kashmir,” Salim Shahzada, a businessman from Uttar Pradesh state, told Al Jazeera, referring to Indian-administered Kashmir. Shahzada said he had visited the place a couple of times and decided to bring his family along this time.
But he had no idea about the health and environmental problems linked to the dumping yard. I only know that this is where marble cutting waste is dumped and that the hill itself is made of this waste,” he said. Kishangarh, a marble and granite hub, is home to nearly 1,200 processing units, with the total daily business estimated at more than 160 million rupees ($1.7m), providing jobs to about 25,000 people, according to the Federation of Indian Granite and Stone Industry.
Every day, nearly 1,000 tankers carry slurry from those units and empty roughly 5,500 tonnes of waste on the government-allotted dump site, which, for the people living nearby, has turned into a health hazard. Gurjar said the yard has affected residents in at least six villages. If there were just one or two, we could deal with them,” he said.
People like me are suffering from chest infections, dental problems and skin allergies. It does not matter whether they are children or elderly people; everyone is suffering.” Gurjar said he and his wife are forced to take regular medicines for chest infections or skin problems. Aditi Goyal, a general physician at Ajmer’s Ganga Narayan Hospital, said the residents of Kishangarh face several health risks, mainly respiratory and skin problems.
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