In November 1988, a cargo barge carrying over 10,000 tonnes of toxic ash, Philadelphia’s gift for the Bahamas, surreptitiously offloaded its contents into the Indian Ocean. By then, the barge had been sailing around the world for 16 months, searching for a suitable dump site; the situation made more theatrical by the ship’s dramatic escape after dumping 4,000 tonnes of ash on a Haitian beach.

About 24 years and one major international treaty later, the situation hasn’t changed a lot for the 1,00,000-odd workers employed in India’s unorganised e-waste sector, who manually dismantle computers, electronics and even cathode ray tubes, exposing themselves and the groundwater to toxic carcinogens and pollutants. Places like Seelampur outside Delhi and Moore Market in Chennai have become the dumping grounds of the world.

However, 2011 marked a watershed of sorts, with India passing the E-waste Management and Handling Act, putting the responsibility on the producers and proposing an elaborate framework for recycling and warehousing. For Selvi, though, and hundreds of her co-workers in Chennai’s busy Moore Market area, little has changed. The Corporation’s plan of upgrading the municipal dumping grounds in Perungudi and Pallikaranai, where unsorted e-waste has polluted the groundwater irreversibly, has been stalled for more than a year and there has been zero progress regarding the segregation of solid waste and setting up dedicated channels for e-waste recycling. While the official attitude is to blame it on a civic dislike of letting their waste go without earning an extra buck for it, as practised by kabadiwallahs, the complete lack of progress is due to more endemic policy problems.

While the act advocates extended producer responsibility (EPR), the buck stops at suggestions. EPR puts the responsibility of disposing a particular product on its original producer, no matter how many times the product has changed hands. This notionally creates a more streamlined and accountable process with only a single nodal body, the producer, deemed responsible.

However, the act defeats the purpose of EPR since it doesn’t place stern penalties, fiscal or otherwise, and leaves the implementation to the producers. Even on the recycling front, the number of collection centres or recycling units has not been specified. So technically, one could set up a single collection centre in the country and still be compliant with the norms of the act. There has been a blanket refusal to set targets and transparency has been sacrificed in favour of multiple authorisations being made mandatory.

Labour manipulation

But the more insidious battle is being played out on the labour turf. The act has ushered in corporate entities as waste managers in a traditionally unorganised sector contracting several hundred informal workers on skeletal wages, giving them the usual option between poison and poverty.The hierarchy of informal workers ensures that the ones involved in illegal smuggling have cushier prospects, while the ones dealing with waste from houses and smallscale industries get displaced.

The ensuing competition messes up the downstream recycling chain with waste now entering the pipeline at several fronts. The primacy of the producer is the crux of EPR and in the absence of a single producer of waste, tracking becomes impossible. The problem is further compounded by the presence of a large number of orphan products, assembled not branded, in the Indian market. The Government also clearly hasn’t learnt from the lead acid battery experience, where the much vaunted EPR failed to provide any check to the proliferation of toxins. This was because there were no provisions for capacity building of the communities that actually handle the products or for the involvement of NGOs or informal sector participation.

Over the past year, there has been a lot of talk about how recycling is profitable and hence the regulatory framework should be left to the corporations. But as the first world shows, profit is seldom a motive to recycle and only legislation forces recycling. It is simply much cheaper for a company to ship its waste abroad. The incentive to do it increases manifold in the absence of toothless legislation.

So, while HP has dedicated recycling units in the US and a robust take-back policy, there are no units in India and the take-back policy is little more than a press release.

Circle of oppression

For many decades now, India and China have been the dump sites of the world, with falsely declared goods flooding the export-friendly SEZs and finding their way to the informal sector. An importer of nearly 50,000 tons of scrap, India is particularly vulnerable to the “charity route”.

As advocated in a number of Time and NYT articles, the two preferred modes of e-waste disposal in the first world are charity and recycling. People donate their used computers and electronics to charities which promptly ship them to third world countries, for a fee. Alternatively, the people pay a fee for recycling (ARF) to the recycling companies. The recyclers take the waste to their godowns and emulate the charities. And while it is illegal to do so in the US, it is a technical gray area in India. It then must be a place of pride for Indians that we too have started taking our share of the pie. Most companies that have a take-back policy in India now ship their waste to Africa or other third world countries as “charity”.

However, the problem also manifests domestically. As cities produce more e-waste, the pressure on suburban villages and landfills increases and instances like Mandur village, where locals refused to be dumped with Bangalore’s garbage, will mushroom. Poor practices and increased urbanisation in cities like Chennai, which produces 10,000 tonnes of e-waste annually, tends to victimise poorer neighbourhoods and the suburbs, which leads to seething tension.

In an interview with Time magazine, Jairam Ramesh said India had signed a 90-million dollar pact with the World Bank for e-waste management and had set up integrated facilities, signalling increased corporatisation and drastic deregulation. Until newer remains better for the rich of both the third and first worlds, the vicious cycle of waste colonisation is set to continue.

(Dhruba is studying at ACJ, Chennai.)

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