E-Waste Management in India: Issues and Strategies

• Rama Mohana R. Turaga,
• Kalyan Bhaskar,
• Satish Sinha,
• Daniel Hinchliffe,
• Morton Hemkhaus,
• Rachna Arora,
• Sandip Chatterjee,
• Deepali Sinha Khetriwal,
• Verena Radulovic,
• Pranshu Singhal,
• Hitesh Sharma

Affiliations

Rama Mohana R. Turaga

has more than two decades of experience in environmental policy and management. An Associate Professor at the IIM Ahmedabad, he teaches sustainability and public policy. Professor Turaga’s research broadly seeks to understand how various actors—governments, businesses and the public—are responding to environmental problems associated with rapid economic development in India. His current research topics include electronic waste regulations, corporate social responsibility practices of Indian firms, voluntary environment-friendly behaviour and smart urban planning. e-mail:

Kalyan Bhaskar

is a faculty member at XLRI Jamshedpur. A Fellow of IIM Ahmedabad, he has taught courses on public policy and business sustainability at IIM Lucknow and IIM Indore. His current research focuses on e-waste management, bioenergy and business sustainability. e-mail:

Satish Sinha

is the Associate Director at Toxics Link, a New Delhi-based NGO, where he leads the research, policy and advocacy group. His expertise is on environmental issues, especially in areas of municipal, hazardous and medical waste management, food safety and chemicals and POPs. e-mail:

Daniel Hinchliffe

is an Advisor on sustainable e-waste management at the Deutsche Gesellschaft für internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH, based in Germany. The GIZ project ‘Sustainable Solid Waste Management and Circular Economy’ supports the development of concepts as well as networking and exchange to improve sustainable e-waste management worldwide on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). e-mail:

Morton Hemkhaus

is a Project Manager at Adelphi and works on projects relating to circular economy, resource efficiency and waste management. In this context, he designs, implements and evaluates multi and bilateral development cooperation projects in the plastics, electronics and textile industries. His main focus is on the design and implementation of Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) systems. He has extensive experience in developing studies, organizing dialogue events and workshops as well as conducting study trips. Further, he is responsible for the coordination of Adelphi’s internal environmental management system in accordance with the requirements of the European EMAS Regulation. e-mail:

Rachna Arora

is Deputy Team Leader for the Resource Efficiency Project of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH funded by the European Union on issues related to fostering resource efficiency and secondary resource utilization. She has been working with the Indian ministries and state-level regulatory agencies on e-waste policy implementation over the past 10 years. e-mail:

Sandip Chatterjee

is the Director, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, and is engaged in implementing R&D projects on electronics material components. He is the nodal officer in the ministry for developing recycling technologies of electronic waste management. e-mail:

Deepali Sinha Khetriwal

is the Managing Director for Sofies India. She has over 15 years of experience on e-waste management, working with international organizations and multinational companies on compliance, pilot projects and system setup in Asia, Africa and Europe. She has been instrumental in setting up the training and capacity development programmes under the umbrella of the E-waste Academy. She holds a PhD from the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland, where her thesis was on modelling for forecasting waste flows of end-of-life consumer durables. e-mail:

Verena Radulovic

has worked with the electronics industry in her role at the US Environmental Protection Agency for over a decade on efforts to improve its environmental performance. As an independent consultant and photographer, outside of her role at EPA, she is currently working on a project exploring the role of the informal sector in electronics reuse and recycling in different countries, including India. e-mail:

Pranshu Singhal

is the Founder of Karo Sambhav Pvt Ltd. (2017), an organization enabling EPR in the waste sector. Before this, he was the Director, Digital Learning Strategy, in the Worldwide Education team of Microsoft for 3 years. He had worked with Nokia as Head, Sustainability, for 11 years and was based in Finland, Singapore and India. He is an Aspen Fellow, an Ashoka Fellow and a Chevening Gurukul Fellow. He has done his Masters in Environmental Management and Policy from IIIEE, Sweden. e-mail:

Hitesh Sharma

provides sustainability consulting and impact assessment services to major corporates, PSUs and foundations in enhancing their ‘valuation by stakeholders’, empowering ‘shared values-based value chain’ and enabling ‘shared value creation’ on ethos of respect–responsibility–resilience. With over 14 years of experience, he is at present a Lead Consultant on Collaborative Projects at Ashoka Innovators for the Public, world’s largest network of social entrepreneurs. In his prior engagements, with key responsibility of leading sustainability integration to business excellence and managing corporate citizenship and product stewardship programmes nationally, he led CSR and environment operations of RICOH in India and worked on diverse areas of sustainability at Infosys Ltd. e-mail: