Worse, pollution control agencies have no clue about the goings-on in Seelampur and other areas in the city. "There is no e-waste dismantling or recycling unit in Delhi as per our records," said an official of the Delhi Pollution Control Committee (DPCC), which is supposed to monitor such activities in the capital. He said these could be illegal units. "The Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) may be doing something about them," he added.
CPCB officials, on the other hand, put the blame on DPCC. "We are not monitoring them. It's the state pollution agency that's supposed to control them," said a CPCB official when asked about e-waste dismantling hubs such as Seelampur, Shashtri Park and Mustafabad.
Truckloads of e-waste —mostly discarded desktop computers and TV sets are brought to Seelampur for dismantling every day where circuit boards are acid-washed or heated on electric stoves or with blowtorches after which recyclable metal components are retrieved. In the process, fumes from heavy metals and acids result in environmental pollution, which also have serious health implications for workers.
Experts say dismantling of e-waste is a thriving market with turnovers in crores. It generates employment for many but the profits go to the middlemen. "From what we understand, most of the money from this business is earned by the middlemen who source the waste from different agencies and sell the recovered valuables. The workers who dismantle the electronic goods are exposed to lead, cadmium, mercury and acid fumes making them vulnerable to severe health impacts. We also suspect that waste from the dismantling process is being thrown into nearby drains, which flow into Yamuna or Hindon," said Piyush Mohapatra of Toxics Link, an environmental NGO.
When TOI visited the units near Seelampur's Kanti Nagar, dismantlers were reluctant to share any details about their trade. Some said Seelampur was one of the biggest recycling hubs in the country. "We get waste from Chennai, Mumbai, and Bangalore everyday. We buy each monitor for Rs 800 and then the components are sold at different rates. Not many of us use acid here, they are acid-washed in Mustafabad," said a dismantler who had just received a truckload consignment from Bangalore. There were sacks of retrieved copper wires and PVC monitors that were being sold by middlemen who sat with calculators as buyers gathered at each unit to buy discarded compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs), cathode ray tubes (CRT) of TV sets and dismantled circuit boards. The waste from the process is often thrown into a nearby stormwater drain.
Vinod Kumar Sharma of Toxics Link claimed that a large chunk of e-waste had been coming to India from the West. "Usually these imports are listed as donations or items for reuse. But they eventually land up in places such as Seelampur," he said. Researchers at Toxics Link attribute this to cheaper recycling options available in India compared to regulated units in those countries. The issue assumes significance as the National Green Tribunal has recently sought response from the Centre on a plea alleging rampant violation of E-waste Management Rules 2011.Toxics Link, in its petition, had alleged that tonnes of second-hand or used goods were being dumped in India leading to pile up of e-wastes.
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