According to the residents, MCD trucks continued to drop garbage in the area near the houses till many of them started pelting stones at them. ``The pressure of the fresh heaps in the morning had pushed the water into these homes,'' said Raju, whose house stands just opposite the dump. The trucks stopped dumping garbage near the houses after the residents protested. ``But that will not help as the dumping continues,'' he said.

Ram Vachan and Mohit Paswan stood in water that reached their waists and threw out bucket after bucket of the city's stinking fluid refuse from their house all day. Munni and her four children were forced to move to the verandah of a neighbour, Jagdish's house. She had moved her utensils and charpoy too and was wondering whether she should start cooking the day's meal there. Asked where she would sleep, she looked helplessly at her neighbours. Another house belonging to Nandu stood amid ditch-water while all the other houses in the row, around 25 of them, had water lashing against their walls menacingly.

A supervisor of the sanitation department at the land-fill site said that the water supply department had been asked to flush out the water and it was supposed to have done the job two months ago. While the department did not do the job, especially after the rains made the situation worse, the work on a road running by the site and the Bhalaswa dairy settlement had also prevented the water collected between the houses and the site from flowing away, he explained.

As for the continued dumping of garbage, he said that the trucks were asked to empty garbage in other parts of the 72 acre site after the protest by the villagers.

The houses in Basant Dada Patel Nagar are separated from the site by just a three foot strip and there is no sign of any wall to separate the two. According to Sanitation Department officials, the site will be walled soon at the cost of around Rs 5 crore. The MCD is on safe grounds despite the fact that the site is close to the houses. For one the slum is unauthorised and secondly the site was used for dumping waste around 20 years ago much before the decade old settlement. That the site was not in use for some time and was revived six years ago does not give the slum dwellers any right to claim the right to healthy surroundings.

That a dairy was sanctioned by the Government near the site and close to the slum remains a fact. So also the fact that the site was not walled all these years.

While the colony of 4000 houses, a fullfledged milk dairy and considerable cattle wealth, live inhaling foul smelling vapours, flies covering every available space, dumping goes on in the 72 acres, endangering the lives of both authorised and unauthorised residents. As Mohammad Mashook Khan of the settlement says, ``the people are always sick, either suffering from cholera or vomitting or fever.'' The site which is six years old will continue to take the city's garbage for another six months or even more unless an alternative site is okayed by then. Or else the people must continue to live in filth.