Amid a river of red acid and sulphurous pools

Over 30,000 people, many of them women and children, working at illegal e-waste processing factories are putting their lives at risk

May 10, 2016 12:00 am | Updated 08:04 am IST - NEW DELHI

Toxic life:Sahil (16) and his mother Nazmeen Bano spend nine hours a day teasing out copper, lead, iron and aluminium from old circuit boards — all for the sterling sum of Rs. 150 a day; labourers work without gloves or masks.Photos: Shanker Chakravarty

Toxic life:Sahil (16) and his mother Nazmeen Bano spend nine hours a day teasing out copper, lead, iron and aluminium from old circuit boards — all for the sterling sum of Rs. 150 a day; labourers work without gloves or masks.Photos: Shanker Chakravarty

: Enveloped in yellow and orange smoke, with a river of red acid and sulphurous pools nearby, 16-year-old Mohammad Sahil has taught himself to be an alchemist.

Since he was 12, Sahil and his mother Nazmeen Bano have spent nine hours a day teasing out copper, lead, iron, aluminium and sometimes even gold in minuscule amounts from old circuit boards; all for the sterling sum of Rs. 150 a day.

Sahil appears immune to the stench of the “acid bath” — name for the chemical degradation of circuitry — at his workstation-cum-home in North-East Delhi’s Mandoli village.

Except Sundays, he spends his day giving acid bath to hundreds of printed circuit boards (PCBs) kept in mounds nearby. He does this sans gloves and masks.

Childhood lost

Nazmeen Bano would rather see her son get an education. “He should have been in school and not in this trench. But his father died in Bihar and I alone could not support four children,” she said, while draining out the caustic chemical soup with her bare hands from one of the many barrels. The chemical residue of their operation finds its way into the overflowing kachcha drains of the area that open out into a small field where children of the locality play.

Mithilesh, who lives in the same locality as Bano and Sahil and makes a similar living is worried about her eight-year-old son Raja’s frequent stomach aches.

Sitting on a heap of circuit boards, the boy helps his mother in cutting PCBs into smaller pieces with an industrial cutter, even as his mother complains about his jaundice and poor eating habits.

To a question about their proximity to chemicals and the lack of protective gear, Mithilesh said: “Already we do not get paid as much compared to the labour we put in. If we go to buy gloves, masks and all, what will we eat.”

Most of these workers are unaware that a safety kit has to be provided by their “maalik” (owner of the business), said Zaheer Ahmad who has been dismantling electronic-wastes in Mandoli Sewa Dham area for 25-years.

He says that the Mandoli industrial area is a thriving hub of Delhi’s illegal e-waste sector that employs scores of women and children. Delhi is India’s biggest e-waste market, about five lakh children are engaged in the system, according to a study by ASSOCHAM-Frost & Sullivan.

E-waste market

Eight kilometres from Mandoli village is Seelampur, the biggest e-waste market in the country where computers, TVs, mobiles and refrigerators converge from several States, as well as from abroad.

“In Seelampur, the discarded goods are dismantled and then different traders buy stuff like PCBs, wires, etc for extraction and the dismantled scrap goes from here to Mandoli for metal extraction,” said Mehtab Alam, a veteran trader of old electronic goods. Like a majority of e-waste handlers in Delhi, he is not authorised by the Delhi Pollution Control Committee (DPCC) to collect the e-waste.

For its 98,000 metric tonnes of e-waste, Delhi has only 29 “collection centres”, and breaking down or recycling it is banned within the national capital territory (NCT).

“With the new law focusing on EPR (extended producer responsibility), we now expect electronics manufacturing companies to come forward and set up more collection points,” said a DPCC official. Other places in Delhi NCR where e-waste is traded, dismantled and recycled include Turkman Gate, Mayapuri, Tila Shahbazpur, Radha Vihar, Kumahar Colony and Rahul Garden.

A new law on e-waste attempts to make the larger informal sector — that handles 95% of the country’s e-waste — formal.

While traders are hopeful of more revenue generation under the new guidelines, workers are far from happy. “It is good if we will get to segregate and dismantle electronic items in high-tech machines. It will be quicker with large quantities being processed at once. But who will help us with the capital? Will we get any soft loan or subsidy assistance?” questioned Mr. Alam.

Making way for big business?

Other e-waste scrap dealers are concerned that this would mean big companies taking over the market. “The law is nothing but a way to kill our business. They will allow big companies to run the show. What will happen to all these small shops in Seelampur?” said Abdulla, who runs a computer scrap store in Old Seelampur’s scrap market.

With almost 30,000 people employed in the system, workers are the most worried lot as they fear losing their jobs without having any alternate occupation.

‘Formal sector can’t do it alone’

According to Chitra Mukherjee, head of programmes, Chintan, the only DPCC-authorised NGO for e-waste collection in Delhi, the government must focus on linking the formal with the informal sector instead of just uprooting the latter.

“The law is good, but the formal sector will not be capable to collect e-waste from every nook and corner of the city. You cannot overlook the service provided by kabaadiwalas and other waste collectors. So, it is only practical to train them and make them work legally. If you do not link the illegal sector with the larger picture, they will spring up again.”

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