Every one of us asking the Government to make some rules, regulation and law to takle the problem of E-waste. This is a wrong approach. We should ask the Government to create facility for collecting the E-Waste. Facilities should come first and education of the people to make use of the facility and why e-waste should be recycled (benifts and income from e-waste and harm it can do if we dont recycle) only when people dont make use of the facility, the rules, regulations and laws should come to decipline the people. Governments in India are notorious of making rules and people in government and politicians make use of such law to harase the people and make money (Bribe). Courts and Lawyers join in to dicide what punishment should be given to people who are honest and dont want to bribe and get away from punishment. I think environmentalists job is to educate the people and force the Government to create facilities needed and not help make rules, regulations and laws to punish our citizens. Lets not waste time on rules, regulations and laws, but spend time on educting the people and forcing the government to create facility for collection, recycle and recover materials from E-waste. It is a profitable business to recycle (recover whatever material from it for reuse) e-waste. Electronic Industry pays tax and duties, buyers pay taxes and duties on purchase. Employees working in electronic industry pay income tax. What for these taxes are collected? Is it for buying new cars and furnishing and remodeling and foreign tous of Ministers? This attitude should stop? It is time that educated think of forcing the government for creating facilities first and then educating the people on how, why and benifits of using such facilities, then make rules if people dont use the facilities created.
We pay huge tax on Cars, pay road tax, Pay insurance premium, Pay huge tax (+40%) on Petrol/Disel and then pay Tols on Roads, Pay panalty or bribe when you voilet road laws because of congestion in Road (resulting from non availability of good roads and wide roads), create accidents because of non availability of good and wide roads, die as a result and make our families suffer. We then blame ourselves that we voilated the rules? What are we doing about the Governent, Police, Courts, Politicians?
Comments
I agree with the comments made to the post. It is critical to have in place rules and regulations since they provide a framework within which the various players can (and should) operate. As we all have seen, in absence of any Rules there is little driver for people to act. Government should play a more strategic role than get into e-waste recycling/ processing. This logic of providing services in lieu of taxes paid is equally valid for other services/ facilities as well so why only e-waste? But we all would agree that it is far from being feasible (for all the various reasons). Since e-waste is generated from the combined actions of producers and consumers, so why should the burden of managing it fall on the government/ public exchequer? There is no dearth of issues where tax money can be put to good use than to utilise it for managing e-waste. Government should use its resources to raise awareness and to enforce the rules/ regulations. As is rightly pointed out in absence of a regulatory framework, the recyclers (private) are unable to operate at full capacity which acts as a disincentive for others to enter the field.
I think the Govt's role should be regulating industries to enforce e-waste recycling/disposal. If the Govt'. enforced the rules appropriately (punishing entities who do not recycle or meet the rules) then most entities would use the e-waste facilities available. We cannot create a facility before there is a demand and Govt. regulations can create the demand for e-waste recycling/disposal facilities. Horse before the cart kind of situation. One could think of the Govt. running the e-waste facilities, but I'm not confident that the facilities will be efficiently run since they will be run with the "unlimited" taxpayer money and will not have any incentive remain profitable.