When Tech is Toxic

Prasanto K Roy

IT industry employee (software engineer), 26, male, high six figure salary,

seeks working-girl match for life... A classified ad, this morning. The icon of

a young software industry. Highly paid, upwardly mobile. Changes his cellphone

every year, his home PC every two years, his office PC, every three.

IT industry employee (e-scavenger), 13, male, erratic pay, seeks friend for

last few years of life... Okay, I made this ad up. But not the person. He's

real. Nor the facts. He's just entered his teens. He will never reach a

six-figure-salary. He will probably not reach age 26.

Our e-scavenger spends his day and evenings demolishing those products, and

others junked from the West. He smashes tubes, he strips copper from PCBs, he's

got the scars and acid burns to show for it. He inhales acid vapor, then smoke

from a cheap bidi.

He's a tech industry guy too, its youngest. A beneficiary of 'consequential

employment', so far downstream you won't ever see him in real life or in our

HR statistics and surveys.

It's scary enough to see India's waste problem on its own merit. 1.1

billion people. No disposal laws. No segregation. Kilotons of kitchen waste,

plastic bags, lightbulbs and broken glass, batteries, all piling up in

landfills. Sometimes, it's half-burnt into toxic smoke. Mostly, it fills up a

landfill, and they move on to another.

Add the e-waste we generate, well over a thousand tonnes, and the problem

suddenly mounts. That stuff is toxic. And our 'recycling and recovery'

culture is so strong that no scrap of metal will be allowed to go waste. Enter

the e-junkyard, the demolition derby, the acid bath.

And add the imports. What does a country do when it has local disposal laws

so tough that you'd have to spend many dollars disposing each kilo of e-scrap?

You export the scrap. You've not violated your local laws, you've saved

money, and hey, there are probably no waste disposal laws in places like India

and China anyway...?

Actually, there are. The PRC now has tough e-waste legislation and

enforcement. We have the former-the Supreme Court has banned e-waste imports-but

not the latter, so the ban's irrelevant anyway. Enter piles of old PCs,

circuit boards, monitors...

Given all this, it's up to the IT industry to police itself. Let

associations like MAIT and its leading members, especially multinational PC

vendors, draw on their global blueprints and show the way. Participate in

disposal; give customers incentives to return cartridges, batteries, and old PCs

and printers; publish a clear e-waste disposal policy for India operations.

Ensure that your products don't kill-someday. Corporate social

responsibility can begin with your own products.

Prasanto K Roy