Dozens of computers are broken down in a day in each such shop, hundreds of others lie in a heap. There's waste ash by the fireplace, lying next to it the meagre food that these young boys eat. After 15 minutes in the shed, you come away with an acid stench on your clothes.
India 'imports' lakhs of PCs every year, mostly from the US, under the guise of charity or recycling. But it's only useful as scrap. As with old PCs, so with discarded mobiles, TV sets and refrigerators. The collective stream is called 'e-waste' because computer waste forms the bulk of it. Americans bought a staggering $125 billion worth of electronic goods in 2005, which meant an equally staggering number of old goods needed to be got rid of. It's reported that there was one obsolete PC in the US for every new one in the market last year. Add to that obsolescence within India, pegged at two per cent per year, and you are looking at a humungous pile of plastic and waste.
But e-waste is only the latest in a rather long list of hazardous material happily received in India, where economics and lobbying usually trump environmental and health concerns. From mixed metal scrap to zinc ash, used oil, plastic waste, lead acid batteries and asbestos, the Indian platter is loaded with stuff that other, mostly rich and developed, nations do not want on their soil. Le Clemenceau may be mired in controversy but other ships of its kind have found safe passage here. Like the two Danish fugitive ships, Riky and Beauport 2. They skirted the Basel Convention that prohibits trans-boundary movement of hazardous wastes between countries, found ways around the Indian laws banning entry of hazardous wastes, the ministry of environment and forests (MOEF), the Supreme Court Monitoring Committee on Hazardous Wastes (SCMC), and were dismembered in Alang last year. Reports say 245 kgs of asbestos was found on one of them when only 40 per cent of the ship had been broken down.