The writer is chairperson of Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER) and former chairperson of the high-powered expert committee on urban infrastructure and services.
Patel is member, Supreme Court committee on solid waste management
The afterlife of e-goods
A rapidly growing e-waste crisis needs rapid official decision-making, time-bound responses.
The city of Moradabad, located on the banks of the river Ramganga (a major tributary of Ganga), is famous for its brassware. This peetal nagari (brass city) of Uttar Pradesh is now the largest e-waste hub in the country, as e-waste is brought there for recovery of metals such as copper and traces of silver and gold. Risky and rudimentary ways of metal recovery from the open burning of e-waste components such as circuit boards and wires have choked the city, while panning the hazardous black ash for metals on the riverbanks has polluted the waters of Ramganga. Moradabad’s air quality index had peaked at 500 in 2017 — the highest reading in the country that year, while the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) found heavy metal contamination of surface water, groundwater, soil and sediments in the vicinity of the river. All this has serious repercussions for the health of the residents, besides being environmentally unsafe. There are fears that a Moradabad-like polluted e-waste hub may be in the making in Jamnagar, next to the brass industry cluster there.
Seelampur, an e-waste hub on the northeast fringe of Delhi, is the largest electronics dismantling market in India. Truckloads of electronic waste is dumped here to scrap dealers whose workers extract mostly copper from the discarded e-waste, again, unmindful of the consequences of the crude methods of recovery on health and environment. There are also other cities engaged in similar eco-disastrous resource recovery from e-waste.
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