Pay consumers to take back e-waste

The new rules proposed by the Ministry of Environment and Forests to manage electronic waste
must be implemented with firm political will to close the gap between growing volumes of hazardous
trash and inadequate recycling infrastructure. India generates about eight lakh tonnes of e-waste
annually, while 151 registered recycling facilities can handle only half of that quantum. There are no
systematic studies on Indias waste generation, a problem that is probably much bigger than
commonly believed. Producers and consumers of electronic goods have a responsibility under the Ewaste (Management and Handling) Rules 2011 to ensure proper disposal, but progress has been slow
for various reasons. Now the E-waste (Management) Rules 2016 provide several options to
manufacturers such as collection of a refundable deposit and paying for the return of goods to
meet the requirements of law. Consumers are naturally keen on recovering economic value from
waste, creating a thriving informal recycling sector. These units use crude methods such as open
burning to extract copper, lead, aluminium and iron. Studies done at informal recyclers near New
Delhi show that concentrated acids are used in an open-air environment to remove copper from
printed circuit boards; the corrosive chemicals are then discharged into surrounding lands. Several
cities are similarly polluted. This is an unsustainable course, especially at a time when rapid
obsolescence of electronic goods is the norm. The Environment Ministry must work closely with the
States to implement the tighter rules.
In spite of its growing environmental footprint, sound management of electronic waste has received
low priority. Urban solid waste management policy has focussed on cleaning streets and transferring
garbage to landfills, ignoring the legal obligation to segregate and recycle. Hazardous materials,
including heavy metals, are dumped in garbage yards, polluting soil and water. The new rules have
positive measures in this regard: they classify mercury-laden light bulbs as e-waste, which will keep
them out of municipal landfills. Bulk consumers have to file annual returns, another welcome move.
An awareness campaign on e-waste will make it easier to implement the rules. Often, consumers do
not let go of defunct gadgets. One U.S. study showed that on average a household keeps four small
and two large e-waste articles in basements and attics. Several Indian households also stock e-waste
items. The success of the new rules will depend on incentivising such consumers to enter the formal
recycling channel using the producer-operated buy-back scheme. They will come on board when the
repurchase offer is better than that of the unorganised sector and a collection mechanism is
available. The Centre and the States have a responsibility to ensure that producers contribute to the
e-waste management system, which has been designed with their inputs. The collection targets, that
will touch 70 per cent in seven years, are realistic. A healthy environment demands that the targets
get more ambitious.

Confrontation within an alliance

Often, all it takes for the resolution of a political crisis is time. Mehbooba Mufti and her Peoples
Democratic Party (PDP) may have ultimately failed to wrest any political concessions from Prime
Minister Narendra Modi before agreeing once again to form a coalition government with the
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Jammu and Kashmir. But by delaying the swearing-in as Chief
Minister for more than two months after the death of her father, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, she

signalled that she is a leader fully conscious of the contradictions in the PDP-BJP alliance and one
who wants to engage the BJP on her own terms. Ms. Mufti would have liked the Centre to commit
itself to a time frame for the implementation of the Agenda of Alliance the PDP and the BJP had
entered into when they first came together after a fractured electoral mandate in the 2014 Assembly
election. But Mr. Modi knew very well that any political concession to the PDP could not come
without some political cost to the BJP, not only in Jammu, but also at the national level. Both parties
were under compulsion to demonstrate to their political constituencies that they would stand firm
and not budge from their stated positions. The stalemate could have ended only with time running
out, not with either side backing down. Ms. Mufti may have come away empty handed but she can
portray herself as a leader who was unwilling to make political compromises for the sake of power. It
was important for her to be seen as being ready to fight the BJP if the situation so warranted;
winning the fight was not an immediate goal.
One of the difficulties for the PDP is that without the active support of the Centre, and the initiation
of a political process for peace and security, no regime in Jammu and Kashmir can overcome the
alienation of large sections of the people in the State. In this sense, for the PDP, the alliance with the
BJP was a means to exert pressure on the Centre to not only grant the State packages for economic
development, but to also facilitate a peace process that brings together all stakeholders within and
beyond the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir to end decades of militancy. However, over the
last year, there has been little forward movement on the peace process. Instead, there have been a
series of controversies, such as the ban on consumption of beef and the use of the State flag. The
PDP, conscious of ceding ground to the National Conference (NC), found itself in a dilemma:
continuing the alliance with the BJP without obtaining political concessions could erode its support
base in the Valley, but ending the alliance could merely hand over the reins of the government to the
NC. Ms. Mufti thus chose the only option available to her: to continue the alliance with the BJP, but
by maintaining a confrontationist edge in the relations with the Centre, which she believes is
necessary to maintain her political credibility within the Valley.

A modest beginning at The Hague

Along with former Serb President Slobodan Miloevic, the Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadics
name is a byword for some of the most brutal ethnic cleansing attempted in recent memory and the
helplessness and inaction of the international community to check it. Karadzics conviction by a
United Nations tribunal in The Hague this week, after a lengthy trial, for genocide, war crimes and
crimes against humanity, is thus an important milestone in holding the guilty to account for the
atrocities in the Balkans in the 1990s and sending a larger message about the efficacy of international
mechanisms to punish excesses. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia
(ICTY) restores hope, albeit a faint one, that political leaders who perpetrate the most brutal
atrocities will not go unpunished. Karadics conviction offers little consolation for the millions of
individual survivors of the conflict. But there are definite implications from the ruling for a societys
collective sense of fairness and justice and the sanctity of the rule of law. For instance, for the
Srebrenica massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in July 1995, the tribunal has upheld the charge
of genocide against Karadzic. The town was a refugee enclave, ostensibly under international
protection. The prosecution may have painstakingly established the culpability of key individuals
such as Karadic and his general Ratko Mladic. But the utter impotence of the UN and North Atlantic
Treaty Organisation forces to prevent the catastrophe, despite repeated warnings, could not have
been overlooked under any serious investigation.

Viewed against this larger backdrop, Thursdays verdict fuels optimism about the role international
tribunals can play in holding powerful political players to account. In fact, their critical contribution
was brought home in 2015 by the ruling of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that adjudicates
disputes between states. The verdict underscored the importance of reconciliation rather than
apportioning blame on either Croatia or Serbia for the atrocities. It thus rejected the contention of
both Zagreb and Belgrade that the 1948 UN Genocide Convention had been breached during the civil
war, when an estimated 1,00,000 people were killed. The merit behind such a cautious stance,
involving disputes between sovereign states, could hardly be overstated considering the potential for
a nationalist backlash. That was precisely the domestic reaction over the release of a Serb ultranationalist leader by the ICTY on health grounds. As regards the permanent global mechanism to try
war crimes and crimes against humanity, the influence of the nascent International Criminal Court
(ICC) has been severely limited from the start. Washington, Beijing, Moscow and New Delhi, among
others, have refused to be brought under its jurisdiction. Moreover, the few investigations The Hague
court has so far initiated have predictably drawn flak, as reflecting a bias against African countries.
Clearly, the lesson from the conviction of Karadic is that the search for justice may be painful and
endless, but it is a price worth paying to bring perpetrators to book and prevent the violation of
human rights.

Distorted discourse in Assam

Over 19.8 million voters in Assam are eligible to exercise their franchise in the two-phase polls on
April 4 and April 11 to elect its 126-seat Assembly. The Assam election assumes importance this time
round because of two interlinked reasons. Arguably, it is the only one among the clutch of States
going to the polls where the Bharatiya Janata Party, a marginal player in West Bengal, Kerala and
Tamil Nadu, has a realistic chance of grabbing power. The verdict in the State will be a barometer of
the extent to which Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been able to retain his appeal. It propelled
him to power at the Centre in 2014 and helped the party pick up an unprecedented seven out of 14
Lok Sabha seats in Assam, but the Assembly elections in Delhi and Bihar thereafter put the brakes on
the BJPs momentum. As with Delhi and Bihar, where Arvind Kejriwal and Nitish Kumar went into
the campaign as strong chief ministerial candidates, the BJP is up against a formidable local leader,
the three-time Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi of the Congress. Mr. Gogoi has striven hard to convert
this into a CM versus PM face-off, but the BJP announced Union Minister for Youth Affairs and
Sports Sarbananda Sonowal as its chief ministerial nominee as early as in January. Nonetheless, the
Modi factor will be crucial for the BJP in Assam because the scale and depth of the party
organisation in the State are not commensurate with its Lok Sabha harvest. Alliances with regional
parties such as the Asom Gana Parishad and the Bodoland Peoples Front have served to fill some
gaps, rendering the election a three-way contest between the BJP-led front, the Congress, and
Badruddin Ajmals All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF).
While national issues, including the ongoing debate over nationalism, have found a resonance in the
campaign, local issues are paramount. The nature of electoral democracy has, however, distorted the
State-level issues at play. The achievements or otherwise of 15 years of uninterrupted Congress rule
in a State that brings up the rear on most human development indices find marginal mention. What
is centre-staged is the insider-outsider binary, with the BJP-led alliance projecting itself as a
grouping of sons of the soil pitted against an evasive Congress, and an AIUDF that seeks to protect
the interests of illegal Bangladeshis. Such rhetoric not only glosses over the nuanced reality of
migration in Assam but also threatens to sharpen the religious lines in a State where over 34 per cent

of the population is Muslim. Having largely left its troubled days of separatist and ethnic militancy
behind over the course of Mr. Gogois terms in office, the State cannot be allowed to be cleaved along
ethno-religious lines for political gains. As campaigning reaches fever pitch, all parties ought to steer
the discourse back to weightier issues of development and social harmony, instead of attempting to
cobble up numbers based on ethnic and religious identities.

Indias case on its solar policy

The Centre is without doubt justified in saying it will contest the ruling in the World Trade
Organisation against Indias policy of local sourcing of components as part of the Jawaharlal Nehru
National Solar Mission. The U.S. had taken to the WTO its case against Indias policy of favouring
domestic inputs in solar cells and solar modules, arguing that it amounted to a discriminatory trade
practice and distorted the game. The verdict, which came last month, is a setback for Indias Solar
Mission, seen as the bedrock of efforts aimed at ensuring energy security and meeting the countrys
commitment to the collective global plan to limit global warming. In fact, over the last year India has
scaled up its solar power ambitions, with the Narendra Modi government increasing fivefold the
target set in 2009 to 100,000 MW. The WTO ruling obviously threatens the financial viability of the
plan. India did offer to modify its stand on the issue, and agreed to apply the domestic content
requirement only for buying solar panels used for government sector consumption. It even assured
Washington that power generated from such subsidised panels would not be sold for commercial
use. The U.S., however, did not agree. The challenge before the government is to sort out trade
practice concerns in a manner that keeps the Solar Mission firmly on track. How it resolves the issue
and it would be well-advised to avoid standing on ego will have repercussions not only on the
countrys green energy aspirations, but also on its capacity to negotiate sectoral roadblocks to its
global-level Make in India lobbying.
The trade rift and the WTO ruling on the solar issue have yet again brought to the fore the absurdity
of seeking a level playing field in an imperfect, highly unequal world. Nations often raise protection
walls in some form or the other to suit their convenience or to further their political interests. The
U.S. is no exception. At least nine States in that country have programmes that provide protection to
domestic manufacturers. In this inter-connected environment, the challenge really lies in balancing
global trade obligations with domestic social compulsions. If the U.S. cannot have other countries
engaged in practices that disadvantage American workers and American businesses, as President
Barack Obama said, India too cannot wish away the job concerns of its people. By providing a green
angle to its solar power programme, India has added a new dimension to the ongoing dispute. As
countries across the world race to take steps to limit climate change, concerns like these will test
international organisations and rule-making to work out solutions that do not obstruct, or even
delay, these efforts. The world indeed requires a spirit of accommodative co-existence for the larger
global good.