Toxicity e-waste ejects could have long term effect on habitat and Homo sapiens. It accounts for approximately 40% of lead and 70% of heavy metals found in landfills. This leads to ground water contamination, air pollution and soil acidification.
India is the fifth biggest producer of e-waste in the world, discarding 1.7 million tonnes (Mt) of electronic and electrical equipment as per UN report. There is a complete ignorance in public about the repercussion of throwing electronic products and accessories unattended.
E-Waste is the sticky end of ever growing world of electronic gadgets. Last two decades and a half have witnessed a revolution in electronic products which has no doubt enormously enhanced our economy, created jobs and brought about a great transformation in our day-to-day life. In 90s electronic gadgets and computers were as expensive as being luxury items and were only within the reach of upper middle class and above.
Over the years, the technology has improved and electronic items have long been easily accessible to common men. Their prices keep on declining and electronic gadgets are becoming more and more affordable as well as useful even for all and sundry. As per various surveys, people prefer ever having a mobile in their possession to having a toilet in their dwelling houses, whether they are from urban or rural areas. With the economy ever growing, we find people universally taking pride in consumerism. Normally durability of these products is not more than four to five years. Due to advancement in technology, day by day consumers do opt for the latest energy- efficient products.
With each passing day new features are coming up leaving behind the previous day’s acquisition of a handset out of date. Our curious mind begins to feel unhappy if left behind in the era of gadget freak world and gets easily lured to purchase latest gadget even on loan which is readily available. It is ironical that there are fewer schemes to provide loan for toilet construction which is a basic necessity for health and hygiene of modern India than purchasing the electronic goods.
Every individual is generating e-waste and masses are ignorant about multiplying and hazardous effects of it. Majority of people are not aware that so much unaccounted magnitude of e-waste will have adverse and irreversible impact on the future generations. The equipments used in most of the industries which include the energy, and oil and natural gas sectors also, have lot of electronic items which also add to the quantum of e-waste. High and prolonged exposure to chemicals/pollutants emitted during unsafe e-waste recycling is also hazardous to health. Lethal contents include lead, cadmium, mercury, polyvinyl chloride, chlorofluorocarbons, arsenic, nickel and barium that are causes of many known and unknown diseases like cancer, asthma, bone diseases, brain diseases and others.
These harmful unbridled pollutants will gradually enter in our body through food chain by contaminating first the soil and later its produce for consumption.
Once an agrarian village Guiyu and its neighboring villages in Guangdong Province of China, have now been converted into graveyard of the world’s largest electronic waste dump sites, there by destroying inherent character and beauty of soil, river water and their flora and fauna.
Studies by the Shantou University Medical College revealed that very high levels of lead were found in young children of these villages that could adversely impact IQ and the development of the central nervous system.
Likewise the village of Sangrampur, a small hamlet located 30 miles south of Kolkata has also been identified as big waste centre though no specific studies have been conducted as yet to as certain its repercussion.
High and prolonged exposure to chemicals/pollutants emitted during unsafe e-waste recycling is also hazardous to health. Lethal contents include lead, cadmium, mercury, polyvinyl chloride, chlorofluoro carbons, arsenic, nickel and barium that are causes of many known and unknown deadly diseases.
A recent study by University of Michigan has found that illegal battery recycling business in Delhi has enhanced the airborne lead levels by two to eight times,well above the recommended health parameters.
The main concern regarding e-waste is that it might contribute only a few percent of total waste but the toxicity it ejects could have long term effect on habitat and Homo sapiens.
E-waste accounts for approximately 40% of lead and 70% of heavy metals found in landfills. This leads to ground water contamination, air pollution and soil acidification. A recent study by University of Michigan has found that illegal battery recycling business in Delhi has enhanced the airborne lead levels by two to eight times, well above the recommended health parameters. About 2 percent of India’s total electronic waste gets recycled due to absence of proper infrastructure, legislation, framework and concrete guidelines.
The country produces approximately 1.3 million metric tonnes of e-waste per annum.
Delhi National Capital Region (NCR) is likely to generate about 1,07,000 metric tonnes (MT) of e-waste per annum by 2017 from the current level of 68,000 metric tonnes per annum growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of about 25 per cent, as revealed by the latest study by the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (ASSOCHAM).
United States is ranked top(42%) acquiring the highest share of e-waste import in India followed by China(30%) and European Union(18%).It is far cheaper for these countries to ship these items than recycling them there.
Though import of e-waste for recycling is banned in India, as per Manufacturers’ Association for Information Technology (MAIT) and GTZ, the German Technical Collaboration Agency survey during 2007 has revealed that about 50,000 tonnes of electronic scrap is imported annually stealthily making India one of the biggest yards of e-waste.
There is need for strong enforcement of law to prevent the country from turning into a dump yard for global waste. Loopholes in law facilitate illegal import. Second-hand electronic equipments having residual life of five years are being imported.
The Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change has notified e-waste management rules, 2016 in which producers are for the first time held responsible for Extended Producers’ Responsibility (EPR). EPR has become common in Europe, but it is a huge success and buy in Japan.
The law places the burden and responsibility of recycling on everyone: consumers, retailers and manufacturers varying with the type of appliance and brand.
However, EPR implementation in Norway mandates the domestic producers and importers to finance the e-waste collection and treatment systems and the financing could happen individually or collectively.
Computer equipment accounts for almost 68 percent of e-waste followed by telecommunication equipment (12%), electrical equipment (8%) and medical equipment (7%). Other equipments, including household e-scrap, account for the remaining 5 percent.
The Three R principles: Reduce e-waste through smart procurement and good maintenance; Reuse electronic equipment by donating or selling; and recycle those products that cannot be repaired will delay the accelerated generation of e-waste. Proper recycling of electronic items will not adversely impact our environment and human healths rather increase the use of reusable and refurbished equipment and reduce energy use while conserving limited resources.
There could be one or more ‘Collection Centres’ in each town as per population variation for collecting the e-waste. The consumers will hand over their unused electronic items to either scrap dealer ‘Kabariwala’ at some cost or directly to the Collection Centre in the town. The scrap dealer in turn will hand over them to the Collection Centres that would send all e-waste to the ‘Disposal Centres’ which will be established near the bigger cities for the bulk collection and processing.
To get rid of unattended e-waste from each household and spread awareness among people, some days may be earmarked in a year or month through the involvement of youth and college students to collect e-waste at some landmark places as initiated in some cities. The scrap dealer or any other unauthorized person should not be permitted to either dismantle the e-waste products or process them to extract any useful item. Rather they would have to necessarily deposit the e-waste at the Collection Centres.
It will deter e-waste going directly into landfills or in the hands of informal sectors. The processing of e-waste should be done through public private partnership at the Disposal Centres. Engagement of various stakeholders and relevant scientific consultation within this chain of events will be a step forward to solve the e-waste problem. Effective implementation of e-waste management policies throughout the industry will streamline informal recyclers and safe disposal of e-waste.
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Petrol in India is cheaper than in countries like Hong Kong, Germany and the UK but costlier than in China, Brazil, Japan, the US, Russia, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, a Bank of Baroda Economics Research report showed.
Rising fuel prices in India have led to considerable debate on which government, state or central, should be lowering their taxes to keep prices under control.
The rise in fuel prices is mainly due to the global price of crude oil (raw material for making petrol and diesel) going up. Further, a stronger dollar has added to the cost of crude oil.
Amongst comparable countries (per capita wise), prices in India are higher than those in Vietnam, Kenya, Ukraine, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Venezuela. Countries that are major oil producers have much lower prices.
In the report, the Philippines has a comparable petrol price but has a per capita income higher than India by over 50 per cent.
Countries which have a lower per capita income like Kenya, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, and Venezuela have much lower prices of petrol and hence are impacted less than India.
“Therefore there is still a strong case for the government to consider lowering the taxes on fuel to protect the interest of the people,” the report argued.
India is the world’s third-biggest oil consuming and importing nation. It imports 85 per cent of its oil needs and so prices retail fuel at import parity rates.
With the global surge in energy prices, the cost of producing petrol, diesel and other petroleum products also went up for oil companies in India.
They raised petrol and diesel prices by Rs 10 a litre in just over a fortnight beginning March 22 but hit a pause button soon after as the move faced criticism and the opposition parties asked the government to cut taxes instead.
India imports most of its oil from a group of countries called the ‘OPEC +’ (i.e, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Russia, etc), which produces 40% of the world’s crude oil.
As they have the power to dictate fuel supply and prices, their decision of limiting the global supply reduces supply in India, thus raising prices
The government charges about 167% tax (excise) on petrol and 129% on diesel as compared to US (20%), UK (62%), Italy and Germany (65%).
The abominable excise duty is 2/3rd of the cost, and the base price, dealer commission and freight form the rest.
Here is an approximate break-up (in Rs):
a)Base Price | 39 |
b)Freight | 0.34 |
c) Price Charged to Dealers = (a+b) | 39.34 |
d) Excise Duty | 40.17 |
e) Dealer Commission | 4.68 |
f) VAT | 25.35 |
g) Retail Selling Price | 109.54 |
Looked closely, much of the cost of petrol and diesel is due to higher tax rate by govt, specifically excise duty.
So the question is why government is not reducing the prices ?
India, being a developing country, it does require gigantic amount of funding for its infrastructure projects as well as welfare schemes.
However, we as a society is yet to be tax-compliant. Many people evade the direct tax and that’s the reason why govt’s hands are tied. Govt. needs the money to fund various programs and at the same time it is not generating enough revenue from direct taxes.
That’s the reason why, govt is bumping up its revenue through higher indirect taxes such as GST or excise duty as in the case of petrol and diesel.
Direct taxes are progressive as it taxes according to an individuals’ income however indirect tax such as excise duty or GST are regressive in the sense that the poorest of the poor and richest of the rich have to pay the same amount.
Does not matter, if you are an auto-driver or owner of a Mercedes, end of the day both pay the same price for petrol/diesel-that’s why it is regressive in nature.
But unlike direct tax where tax evasion is rampant, indirect tax can not be evaded due to their very nature and as long as huge no of Indians keep evading direct taxes, indirect tax such as excise duty will be difficult for the govt to reduce, because it may reduce the revenue and hamper may programs of the govt.
Globally, around 80% of wastewater flows back into the ecosystem without being treated or reused, according to the United Nations.
This can pose a significant environmental and health threat.
In the absence of cost-effective, sustainable, disruptive water management solutions, about 70% of sewage is discharged untreated into India’s water bodies.
A staggering 21% of diseases are caused by contaminated water in India, according to the World Bank, and one in five children die before their fifth birthday because of poor sanitation and hygiene conditions, according to Startup India.
As we confront these public health challenges emerging out of environmental concerns, expanding the scope of public health/environmental engineering science becomes pivotal.
For India to achieve its sustainable development goals of clean water and sanitation and to address the growing demands for water consumption and preservation of both surface water bodies and groundwater resources, it is essential to find and implement innovative ways of treating wastewater.
It is in this context why the specialised cadre of public health engineers, also known as sanitation engineers or environmental engineers, is best suited to provide the growing urban and rural water supply and to manage solid waste and wastewater.
Traditionally, engineering and public health have been understood as different fields.
Currently in India, civil engineering incorporates a course or two on environmental engineering for students to learn about wastewater management as a part of their pre-service and in-service training.
Most often, civil engineers do not have adequate skills to address public health problems. And public health professionals do not have adequate engineering skills.
India aims to supply 55 litres of water per person per day by 2024 under its Jal Jeevan Mission to install functional household tap connections.
The goal of reaching every rural household with functional tap water can be achieved in a sustainable and resilient manner only if the cadre of public health engineers is expanded and strengthened.
In India, public health engineering is executed by the Public Works Department or by health officials.
This differs from international trends. To manage a wastewater treatment plant in Europe, for example, a candidate must specialise in wastewater engineering.
Furthermore, public health engineering should be developed as an interdisciplinary field. Engineers can significantly contribute to public health in defining what is possible, identifying limitations, and shaping workable solutions with a problem-solving approach.
Similarly, public health professionals can contribute to engineering through well-researched understanding of health issues, measured risks and how course correction can be initiated.
Once both meet, a public health engineer can identify a health risk, work on developing concrete solutions such as new health and safety practices or specialised equipment, in order to correct the safety concern..
There is no doubt that the majority of diseases are water-related, transmitted through consumption of contaminated water, vectors breeding in stagnated water, or lack of adequate quantity of good quality water for proper personal hygiene.
Diseases cannot be contained unless we provide good quality and adequate quantity of water. Most of the world’s diseases can be prevented by considering this.
Training our young minds towards creating sustainable water management systems would be the first step.
Currently, institutions like the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IIT-M) are considering initiating public health engineering as a separate discipline.
To leverage this opportunity even further, India needs to scale up in the same direction.
Consider this hypothetical situation: Rajalakshmi, from a remote Karnataka village spots a business opportunity.
She knows that flowers, discarded in the thousands by temples can be handcrafted into incense sticks.
She wants to find a market for the product and hopefully, employ some people to help her. Soon enough though, she discovers that starting a business is a herculean task for a person like her.
There is a laborious process of rules and regulations to go through, bribes to pay on the way and no actual means to transport her product to its market.
After making her first batch of agarbathis and taking it to Bengaluru by bus, she decides the venture is not easy and gives up.
On the flipside of this is a young entrepreneur in Bengaluru. Let’s call him Deepak. He wants to start an internet-based business selling sustainably made agarbathis.
He has no trouble getting investors and to mobilise supply chains. His paperwork is over in a matter of days and his business is set up quickly and ready to grow.
Never mind that the business is built on aggregation of small sellers who will not see half the profit .
Is this scenario really all that hypothetical or emblematic of how we think about entrepreneurship in India?
Between our national obsession with unicorns on one side and glorifying the person running a pakora stall for survival as an example of viable entrepreneurship on the other, is the middle ground in entrepreneurship—a space that should have seen millions of thriving small and medium businesses, but remains so sparsely occupied that you could almost miss it.
If we are to achieve meaningful economic growth in our country, we need to incorporate, in our national conversation on entrepreneurship, ways of addressing the missing middle.
Spread out across India’s small towns and cities, this is a class of entrepreneurs that have been hit by a triple wave over the last five years, buffeted first by the inadvertent fallout of demonetization, being unprepared for GST, and then by the endless pain of the covid-19 pandemic.
As we finally appear to be reaching some level of normality, now is the opportune time to identify the kind of industries that make up this layer, the opportunities they should be afforded, and the best ways to scale up their functioning in the shortest time frame.
But, why pay so much attention to these industries when we should be celebrating, as we do, our booming startup space?
It is indeed true that India has the third largest number of unicorns in the world now, adding 42 in 2021 alone. Braving all the disruptions of the pandemic, it was a year in which Indian startups raised $24.1 billion in equity investments, according to a NASSCOM-Zinnov report last year.
However, this is a story of lopsided growth.
The cities of Bengaluru, Delhi/NCR, and Mumbai together claim three-fourths of these startup deals while emerging hubs like Ahmedabad, Coimbatore, and Jaipur account for the rest.
This leap in the startup space has created 6.6 lakh direct jobs and a few million indirect jobs. Is that good enough for a country that sends 12 million fresh graduates to its workforce every year?
It doesn’t even make a dent on arguably our biggest unemployment in recent history—in April 2020 when the country shutdown to battle covid-19.
Technology-intensive start-ups are constrained in their ability to create jobs—and hybrid work models and artificial intelligence (AI) have further accelerated unemployment.
What we need to focus on, therefore, is the labour-intensive micro, small and medium enterprise (MSME). Here, we begin to get to a definitional notion of what we called the mundane middle and the problems it currently faces.
India has an estimated 63 million enterprises. But, out of 100 companies, 95 are micro enterprises—employing less than five people, four are small to medium and barely one is large.
The questions to ask are: why are Indian MSMEs failing to grow from micro to small and medium and then be spurred on to make the leap into large companies?
At the Global Alliance for Mass Entrepreneurship (GAME), we have advocated for a National Mission for Mass Entrepreneurship, the need for which is more pronounced now than ever before.
Whenever India has worked to achieve a significant economic milestone in a limited span of time, it has worked best in mission mode. Think of the Green Revolution or Operation Flood.
From across various states, there are enough examples of approaches that work to catalyse mass entrepreneurship.
The introduction of entrepreneurship mindset curriculum (EMC) in schools through alliance mode of working by a number of agencies has shown significant improvement in academic and life outcomes.
Through creative teaching methods, students are encouraged to inculcate 21st century skills like creativity, problem solving, critical thinking and leadership which are not only foundational for entrepreneurship but essential to thrive in our complex world.
Udhyam Learning Foundation has been involved with the Government of Delhi since 2018 to help young people across over 1,000 schools to develop an entrepreneurial mindset.
One pilot programme introduced the concept of ‘seed money’ and saw 41 students turn their ideas into profit-making ventures. Other programmes teach qualities like grit and resourcefulness.
If you think these are isolated examples, consider some larger data trends.
The Observer Research Foundation and The World Economic Forum released the Young India and Work: A Survey of Youth Aspirations in 2018.
When asked which type of work arrangement they prefer, 49% of the youth surveyed said they prefer a job in the public sector.
However, 38% selected self-employment as an entrepreneur as their ideal type of job. The spirit of entrepreneurship is latent and waiting to be unleashed.
The same can be said for building networks of successful women entrepreneurs—so crucial when the participation of women in the Indian economy has declined to an abysmal 20%.
The majority of India’s 63 million firms are informal —fewer than 20% are registered for GST.
Research shows that companies that start out as formal enterprises become two-three times more productive than a similar informal business.
So why do firms prefer to be informal? In most cases, it’s because of the sheer cost and difficulty of complying with the different regulations.
We have academia and non-profits working as ecosystem enablers providing insights and evidence-based models for growth. We have large private corporations and philanthropic and funding agencies ready to invest.
It should be in the scope of a National Mass Entrepreneurship Mission to bring all of them together to work in mission mode so that the gap between thought leadership and action can finally be bridged.