At Old Seelampur, an impoverished neighbourhood in Northeast Delhi, rows of hollowed-out computer monitors line a dingy lane. On another street here, room after room on either side is piled high with dusty keyboards and metallic innards of computers and other electronic goods. Welcome to the wasteland of India’s urban refuse. Here, heaps of electronic waste — or e-waste as it is more commonly referred to — wait to be dismantled and recycled for anything of value.

Byculla residents have been forced to live in unhygienic conditions with the stench of adult diapers, bloodied cotton swabs, gauges, syringes, needles, used intravenous tubes and an endless list of biomedical waste for the past 20 days. The reason: The prestigious Masina hospital, flouting all rules, has dumped huge bags of biomedical waste on the road outside the hospital and the BMC, it appears, is least bothered.

Shimla: The European Union (EU) has approved a Rs 7-crore city sanitation project for the state capital along with capacity building and awareness in four other municipalities in Himachal Pradesh. The erstwhile summer capital of the British, a pale shadow of its glorious past, was ranked at the 293rd position in a survey of 450 cities undertaken by the Urban Development Ministry in 2009. The EU project will hopefully help the “Queen of Hills” regain some ground and emerge as a cleaner and better city.

In a bid to promote its renewed initiative for the segregation of wet and dry garbage, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) is planning to rope in activists and residents of several housing colonies in the city. Civic officials, along with environmentalists and members of the Advance Locality Management (ALM), will participate in an ‘eco mela’, to be held later this month at Powai. Residents from the area will be introduced to NGOs that work towards garbage management and door-to-door collection of segregated waste.

What do you need to visit a foreign city and deliver a lecture on climate change? A high-profile persona, an elite degree, and the right connections, perhaps.
However, Sushila Sable, 48, an illiterate ragpicker from Kanjurmarg doesn’t have any of the above. But her concern towards clean garbage disposal, which motivated 3,000 city ragpickers to form the Parisar Bhagini Vikas Sangh, was enough to have her speak at the Durban climate change conference a week ago.

OUTSIDE THE mind space of Delhi’s elite, a war is brewing. It is a battle for livelihood, a fight to find the answer to one question: Who has a right to the city’s garbage? The Delhi government’s push towards corporatisation of door-to-door collection of 8,000 tonnes of solid municipal waste has been formulated with scant regard for the city’s 3.5 lakh waste pickers. Or for the neighbourhoods where this waste is to be incinerated in waste-to-energy plants.