Start at the end.

In the summer of 2024, a Chinese firm that runs waste-to-energy plants sold its entire Indian business for Rs 1 crore – about the price of a modest flat in the city it had been hired to clean. Seven years earlier it had bought that same business, pumped in roughly Rs 428 crore, and promised to shrink the growing landfills in Gurugram and Faridabad.

Somewhere between the Rs 428 crore that went in and the Rs 1 crore that came out is the story of too many backers disappointed. And it is not a simple one, of an Indian company taking foreign investors for a ride.

This is the story of that Indian firm, Ecogreen Energy Pvt Ltd, failing to deliver the Indian expansion that China Jinjiang Environment Holding Co Ltd had made it the anchor of.

It is the story of a web of firms linked to Ecogreen – some the promoters’ own – in effect absorbing money meant for waste plants and garbage processing into consultancy fees, rent and inside deals.

It is the story of the Bandhwari landfill, which the company was hired to shrink, climbing instead towards a mountain taller than the Aravalli slope beside it. Of the processing plant that was to transform the city, and that exists to this day only as a model made of wood and plastic.

And it is the story of the bill, which the public paid whether or not anything worked. 

More than Rs 325 crore of taxpayers’ money went for targets that were barely met. Gurugram paid Ecogreen Rs 157 crore before it terminated the contract. Money flowed despite similar violations in other cities. Lucknow paid the company Rs 169.21 crore, according to Uttar Pradesh’s 2025 CAG report, including for a stretch when the plant it was running was shut. Gwalior in Madhya Pradesh eventually paid other agencies to do work Ecogreen was initially contracted to do. 

Ecogreen failed on many counts. But it is only the largest specimen of a wider habit.

In the assembly, Haryana’s urban local bodies minister Vipul Goel put the government’s waste-management commitments for Gurugram and Faridabad between 2017 and 2026 at Rs 862 crore across 10 companies. When Ecogreen finally collapsed, the state had hired nine more companies on Rs 532 crore of fresh tenders simply to claw back the pile the firm had left behind – and six of those nine were themselves penalised for missing deadlines. 

Penalties, throughout, ran to a small fraction of payments. Blacklistings were handed down to two firms, then reversed for one. A fresh Rs 600-crore tender is already on the street.

In Gurugram, the contracts pile up the way the garbage does, and to much the same effect. This is one thread of that larger story, pulled all the way through.