If you remember to crush plastic bottles, don’t see hospital waste lying around, or if India has not become a dumping ground for waste, thank Ravi Agarwal. A communications engineer, he got into full-time activism a decade ago, and is now synonymous with the war against waste. Agarwal, 47, heads the Delhi-based NGO Toxics Link. He lobbies for change in the way waste is handled in the country—from innocuous household garbage to lethal industrial waste to more recent e-waste. His style is quiet, his key weapon irrefutable research. There are three important sets of norms he has been closely associated with. All three are national landmarks— Biomedical Waste and Management Handling Rules 1998, Municipal Waste Management and Handling Rules 2000, and Hazardous Waste Rules 2002. In 1996, Agarwal intervened successfully in the Delhi High Court, which issued a nationwide ban on import of lead acid batteries from the US. The next year, the Supreme Court banned import of all hazardous substances. “I was carrying no baggage, I came from the outside and believed in pointed intervention,” says Agarwal, reflecting on his initial success. His contribution to the Biomedical Waste Rules 1998 was in incorporating global best practices. Words like ‘dioxin’ entered the Indian lexicon; burning PVC was banned. There were other gains too: the World Bank started budgeting for medical waste management for the first time in India, in its immunisation programmes. Agarwal saw the one negative fallout of India’s IT boom fairly early, and has had a team working on the problem of discarded computers for the past two years. The Hazardous Waste Rules 2002, brought in the ‘polluter pays’ principle. Companies were made responsible for the waste they generated and were required to clean up contaminated sites. Agarwal’s third baby, the Municipal Waste Rules has been, by his own admission, the weakest in its implementation. Segregation of garbage and involvement of local community groups were some of the ideas it brought in. “This is yet to work in the entire country,” he admits, “because the policy has no money and municipalities work in the old mode.” His current obsession is e-waste, generated from old computers and electronic appliances. He saw this one negative fallout of India’s IT boom fairly early, and has had a team working on e-waste for the past two years. By any yardstick, Agarwal has achieved much, but he is not one to rest on his laurels. How would he measure his achievements? “The issue should be alive even if I am not there.” That way, he guesses, his crusade for a cleaner India wouldn’t have gone for waste.
