E-Waste Management in India-An Overview

The existing practices of e-waste management in India suffer from quite a few disadvantages like appropriate inventory, unhealthy conditions of informal recycling, inadequate legislation, poor awareness and reluctance on part of the corporate to address the critical issues involved. As such, these lead to toxic materials entering the waste stream with no special precautions to avoid the known adverse effects on the environment and human health and recoverable bye-products are wasted when economically valuable materials are dumped or unhealthy conditions are developed during the informal recycling. This paper attempts to provide a brief insight into this concept of e-waste, its generation in India and the environmental and health concerns attached to it. Further, it highlights the e-waste recycling economy in the existing informal and the nascent formal sector and the immediate need for a more defined legislation and strategies to tackle this problem.