Welcome To Moradabad, India's Largest Dump Of Your Unwanted Hardware And Electronic Waste

The western UP district of Moradabad has for some time now been recycling 50 per cent of all printed circuit boards in India. No wonder then that it generates a staggering 9 tonnes of hazardous waste daily, with officials saying close to 50,000 people are involved in it.

Most Of recycling is illegal

Most of the recycling is illegal and residents have now begun to panic. Confirming their worst fears, latest research by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) on Moradabad's e-waste recycling industry says the situation is alarming. The report adds that residents may face serious health hazards, including cancer, apart from the industry posing a serious threat to the environment.

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CSE's Anupam Srivastava said on Friday that the report will soon be presented to the Union and state governments. Since there are no standards to study heavy metal contamination of soil in India, CSE compared the results to Canadian and US Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) standards.

Grave danger to public life

It found that zinc levels were 15 times more than that in those two countries. Copper levels, in turn, were five times higher in the five different soil samples collected near river Ramganga, an important tributary of Ganga. Chromium level was twice the Canadian standard, while cadmium was 1.3 times.

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"The country does not even have soil contamination norms or standards. We need to develop them to gauge the level of pollution in cities like Moradabad. There is also a need to monitor all riverside activities on the Ramganga river," said Rama Kant Sahu, deputy head of CSE's Pollution Monitoring Laboratory.

According to the study, the results were similar for water samples taken from Ramganga where mercury levels were found to be eight times higher. Traces of arsenic were found too.

CSE collected samples from Nawabpura, Karula, Daswaghat and Rehmat Nagar localities, where a vast majority of the population is involved in handling e-waste, and Bhojpur, a neighbouring village which is also a major e-waste handling centre.

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"With such huge amounts of e-waste being dumped in the city, structural mechanisms are needed to deal with the problem," CSE deputy director general Chandra Bhushan said. Quoting specialists, the study said that the soil and water of Moradabad contain heavy metals which are dangerous to the environment and can cause serious ailments, including cancer. High levels of mercury and arsenic can lead to chronic poisoning.

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Moradabad-based Navneet Agarwal said that tests to detect such poisoning are usually expensive and nobody gets them done. Mercury enters the food chain through bio-accumulation in fish and other aquatic life forms. It is a known neurotoxin and interferes with the proper functioning of the brain and the nervous system. However, ailments caused by heavy metal pollution go unreported or undetected. "High levels of zinc, cobalt and nickel do not have any reported clinical problems, but they may lead to sub-clinical problems which cannot be detected on the basis of symptoms, but persist," physician Mukesh Raizada said.

District magistrate Zuhair-bin-Sageer, "We are in constant touch with the central government and departments of telecommunication and forest for installation of an e-waste recycling process units in Moradabad."

The health hazard was also highlighted in a report the district pollution control board had shared with the central government last year. In fact, then UP chief secretary Javed Usmani had ordered a complete ban on e-waste recycling in Moradabad, Ghaziabad and Hapur last year, but nothing much came of it. A team from the central pollution control board too had visited these areas to prepare a report on the pollution levels in the region last year.

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There have been several incidents in the city where residents have had to rush out of their houses choking on toxic fumes. In many cases, such incidents have led to hospitalization of people and police raids on illegal e-waste recycling dens. In 2014, more than 50 cases of illegal e-waste recycling were registered under Mughalpura and Nagfani police stations and more than a hundred offenders were put in jail.