The new electronic waste legislation proposed by the Ministry of Environment and Forests has come under fire from experts saying it does not adhere to the international conventions and will open the floodgates for e-waste dumping in India.
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A PTI report from Mumbai said hazardous e-waste was entering India under the guise of charity and study material from abroad and was threatening the country’s environment. “There is no clarity in laws handling waste which comes to our ports in the guise of charity goods or study material,” said Joint Commissioner, Customs, Rajiv Yadav.
Bas de Leeuw, head of the strategy unit of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), said, “India should design a better legal structure and all stake-holders should be taken into confidence to protect the environment.” Largescale unethical export of e-waste by industrialised nations is taking place, he added. Ramapati Kumar of Greenpeace said the draft e-waste legislation, if enacted in the present form, would open the floodgates to e-waste dumping in India. “It is a toothless piece of paper,” he said.
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An estimate by Toxic Links, an NGO dealing with e-waste, said every year over 50,000 tonnes of e-waste was dumped in Indian cities. The draft Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) bill circulated by the government earlier this year envisages regulation of dumping of electronic waste from homes and industry.
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An estimate by Toxic Links, an NGO dealing with e-waste, said every year over 50,000 tonnes of e-waste was dumped in Indian cities. The draft Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) bill circulated by the government earlier this year envisages regulation of dumping of electronic waste from homes and industry.
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Only agents registered with the Central Pollution Control Board would be authorised to buy e-waste from consumers.
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.
