MUMBAI - With
1,150 information technology (IT) companies near
Bangalore alone generating 6,000 tonnes of lethal
electronic waste annually, India's silicon dream is
unleashing an unforeseen nightmare. Non-governmental
organizations such as the New Delhi-based Toxics Links
are ringing the warning bells about India becoming the
world's biggest electronic junkyard, with e-waste being
illegally sneaked in from the United States, Singapore,
Malaysia, Belgium and the Middle East.
In a
report released in March, Toxics Links said that India
produced e-waste worth US$1.5 billion last year. "The
pressure from overseas is getting bigger, after China
has banned imports of e-waste," Kishore Wankhade, senior
program officer of Toxics Links, told Asia Times Online.
India, domestically, expects to see 2 million personal
computers below the Pentium 1 grade junked within the
next three years. It's a conservative figure, given the
government's plans to spread computer literacy and the
quantity of cheaper computers hitting the market.
"The e-waste recycling business is organized in
a disorganized way," says Wankhade, whose colleagues are
probing the extent of the problem in Indian cities like
Delhi, Chennai and Mumbai. "Definitely good profits are
being made, that's why people are engaged in this risky
business." Cheap labor costs and weak environmental
control feed an outsourcing industry India can do
without. According to Toxics Links, recycling a computer
in India costs about $4, against $20 in the US.
This largely unmonitored and unsafe electronic
waste recycling industry poisons air, water, land and
Indians with toxins such as mercury, lead and arsenic.
It threatens to turn the government's chest-thumping
"India Shining" campaign to "India Choking" in the next
few years if the situation continues as it has.
Some Indian environmental activists already
compare the emerging e-waste threat in south India with
that of the Chinese village of Guiyu, located in
Guangdong province near Hong Kong. Guiyu was a quiet
rice village five years ago, before truckloads of
e-waste arrived for the locals - including four-year old
girls - to recycle for about a $1 per day in wages.
Guiyu now lies wasted with undrinkable water, poisoned
land, sick children, and as a global signpost to the
e-waste threat. One report claimed that, among other
miseries, Guiyu villagers suffered from permanently
blackened teeth.
A national workshop in New
Delhi on e-waste management has woken up the Indian
government. The Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB)
announced it had formed a task force to compile a rapid
assessment survey in Chennai, Kolkata and Bangalore
within the next six months. In Delhi, the CPCB had
discovered two truckloads of e-waste arrive daily, 300
days a year.
The bigger threat is from imports.
Computer waste is being shipped in as "mixed electronic
computer scrap", or as second-hand charitable gifts,
through ports such as Chennai. The Basel Convention has
been given the heave ho, enforced from 1992 and ratified
by 159 countries, to prevent "transboundary movements of
hazardous wastes and their disposal". But in keeping
with its usual disregard for international environmental
agreements, the US, the world's biggest producer and
exporter of e-waste, refuses to sign the Basel
Convention.
At the same time, the
Washington-based National Safety Council expects
American e-waste in the next few years to create more
than 2 billion kilograms of plastic, 0.5 billion kg of
lead, 1 million kg of cadmium, 0.5 million kg of
chromium, and nearly 200,000 kg of mercury. How much of
this will make its way onto Indian land, water, air and
bodies worries activists. "Traders and dismantlers in
Delhi say that one container lands in Seelampur every
third day," says Wankhade, "but this statement is also
difficult to substantiate with data. We have only begun
to study the problem."
Random sting operations
show the volume of data waiting to be unearthed. Earlier
this year, Western journalists posing as an Irish
computer shop found US firms eager to dodge Basel
regulations. Brokers told a BBC crew that they stick
$100 bills inside the shipping container to give customs
officials ready-made bribes. "In the customs, data is
recorded both in manual format as well as computerized
format," says Wankhade. "Our investigations in the
Chennai port revealed that the traders prefer the manual
way of clearance, and bribes could be a reason for it."
"It is a myth that e-waste can be fully
recycled," says the Toxics Links report. "Only 10
percent of parts can be reused. The rest is melted down
for metal recovery. Wires are burnt for copper recovery,
but it would take the dismantling of six computers to
generate one kilo of copper." Each computer contains two
or three kilos of unusable lead. The human cost includes
the threat of mercury entering the skin and harming the
kidneys; lead intake can damage respiratory organs and
the central nervous system.
Indian activists are
angry at multinationals adopting double standards, of
toeing environmental concerns in the West but ignoring
safety norms in Asia. Some healing balm comes in joint
ventures like the Advisory Services in Environmental
Management, a partnership between the Indian Ministry of
Environment and Forests and the German Agency for
Technical Cooperation to focus on urban and industrial
environmental management.
More promising is the
Indian collaboration with entities like the Swiss
Association for the Information, Communication and
Organizational Technologies, reputed to be world leader
in safely recycling e-waste. Local companies,, too, are
unfolding future plans. E-Parirara declared its
intention to establish a scientifically managed e-waste
recycling plant at Dobbespet, 50 kilometers from
Bangalore, with the capacity to treat one tonne of
e-waste daily.
The anti-e-waste brigade hopes
that the long-term solution will involve electronic
companies offering "buy back" schemes, and better
technological alternatives like liquid crystallized
displays. "At the moment," says Wankhade bluntly, "It is
a certain lose-lose situation for all."
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
