Electronic waste (e-waste) creates a global crisis due to environmental degradation. India, as a growing economy, is facing serious challenges in managing the volume of generated e-waste due to lack of environmental awareness and socio-economic issues. Major concern of e-waste management in India is its recycling undertaken by non-formal sector not adhering to health and environmental norms.

While e-waste poses a problem for the environment it is also a source of valuable resources and contains a number of precious metal and mineral resources, which are available in very limited quantities in nature.

While Ministry of Environment and Forests and Climate Change is involved in enacting laws, guidelines referring to e-waste and has formulated the E-Waste (Management and Handling) Rules, 2010 wrt safe handling of e-waste, Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY) has addressed indigenous technology development through its R&D efforts to recycle e-waste and extract pressure resources following environment and health norms.

In this direction DeitY has initiated a demonstration plant to showcase its developed technology of processing printed circuit boards (PCB) to recover precious metals at Bangalore. DeitY also proposes to provide capital subsidy to authorized recyclers for processing e-waste similar to support available under the M-SIPS scheme of DeitY. Further recyclers using indigenous technology could be given additional advantage.

DeitY seeks views and suggestion to address the e-waste issues both in term of technology development as well as policy initiatives.

Comments should be received by 10th February, 2015.