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<keyword id="6354321" type="CITY" weightage="20" keywordseo="Bengaluru">Bengaluru</keyword> didn’t earn the sobriquet of India’s Silicon Valley overnight. The city, which began its transformation from a lush farmland to the country’s IT destination in early 1980s when the then chief minister Gundu Rao allowed Texas Instruments to set up an overseas development centre near HAL Airport in the suburb, is now home to close to 40 per cent of the country’s 1 million IT professionals. It is also housing more than 3,000 software firms and close to 50 hardware companies and the leading ones among these alone generate annual revenues of close to $20 billion, a sizable portion of the $85 billion the country earns yearly by exporting software, technology related services. 
 While Bengaluru’s meteoric growth as a hot <keyword id="6419180" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="40" keywordseo="IT-hub">IT hub</keyword> is amply celebrated by media, corporate, civic society and the government, the unprecedented damages is has caused to the environment and health of those who reside in the city is not even talked about. For instance, the city produces close to 20,000 tonnes of <keyword id="6361522" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="100" keywordseo="E-waste">e-waste</keyword> per year; this figure is rising 20 per cent per year and the amount of computer waste across the country is likely to increase by nearly 500 per cent by 2020, according to a recent report by the Association of Chamber of Commerce and Industry of India (<keyword id="6355988" type="CITY" weightage="80" keywordseo="Assocham">ASSOCHAM</keyword>). 
 
E-waste or electronic waste is broadly contributed by electrical or electronic devices, which are destined for disposal, reuse, resale or recycling. These include cathode ray tubes or CRTs that are used in TVs, computer monitors, ATM and video cameras; printed circuit boards (thin plates on which chips and other electronic components are placed); chips and other gold plated components; plastics from printers, keyboards and monitors and computer wires. 
 
Electronic scrap components such as CRTs contain contaminants such as lead, cadmium, beryllium, or brominated flame retardants can cause severe health problems to those who come in contact with them. 
 
In developing countries e-waste is processed informally mostly in the unorganised sector, without the help of machines and technology which exasperate the threat posed by it. In third-world countries, this waste is simply dumped at landfills and incinerators (apparatus for burning waste material, especially industrial waste, at high temperatures until it is reduced to ash). Materials such as heavy metals are leaked from such landfills, polluting soil and water bodies and thus posing serious threat to those living nearby. Heavy metals such as lead and barium get leached to the ground water, leading to the release of toxic phosphor. Other hazardous materials like brominated dioxin, beryllium cadmium and mercury also get discharged into rivers which carry them to far-off places and other water bodies. Brominated dioxins, heavy metals and hydrocarbons result in emissions of toxic fumes which cause breathing problems which over a period of time result in serious respiratory diseases. Hydrocarbons, heavy metals and brominated substances discharged directly into rivers also acidify fish and flora while tin and lead contaminate surface and groundwater, triggering significant risk to workers and communities living close to the locations where waste is disposed. 
 
E-waste is increasingly becoming a major health and environmental hazard to not just India, but countries across the globe including the so-called rich nations. For instance, an estimated 50 million tonnes of e-waste is produced each year in the US alone; while the US discards 30 million computers each year, 100 million phones are disposed off in Europe each year. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, even in the developed world only over 20 per cent of e-waste is recycled and the rest go to landfills and incinerators. While an attempt is made by rich nations to involve private firms which are trying to come up with innovative technologies to manage disposal of e-waste, India is yet to catch up. 
 
Villagers living around the landfill site at Mandur, 25 kms from Bengaluru, have been bearing the brunt of the IT city's garbage, including e-waste, for years. They have been protesting against dumping of garbage which has created huge mounds, leading to respiratory diseases. Over the last couple of years attempts of villagers at Mandur and other landfill sites around Bengaluru to block trucks carrying waste led to disruption of waste-management in the city (civic activities say now Bengaluru’s nickname should be ‘garbage city’ not ‘garden city’). Several deaths of villagers at Mandur and other landfill sites over the years supposedly caused by exposure to polluted air and water point to the huge threat posed by unorganised disposal of garbage, a significant part of which is increasingly becoming e-waste in most Indian cities, and how it can impede society’s health and broader economic growth too.

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Why Rising Mounts Of E-Waste Jeopardise India’s Technology-Driven Growth

Preetam Kaushik

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