On October 14, the world marks the International E-Waste Day. This year, the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Forum’s theme is “Fast Tech”: small, inexpensive electronic products that are easily bought and discarded. These include earphones, charging cables, USB adapters, LED lights, mini-fans and electronic toys. But electronics do not simply disappear when consumers are finished with them. In Northeast Delhi, discarded electronics become livelihoods. Reporting from Seelampur and Mustafabad has documented how workers segregate scrap, dismantle handsets and televisions, and recover copper and other metals for resale, often in hazardous conditions. Others repair devices and extend their useful lives. These are different kinds of work, not interchangeable stages of a single activity called “recycling”. Seen through this labour, e-waste is not simply a technological problem. It is also a question of livelihoods, knowledge and the distribution of value. Who gets counted when recycling is counted?What the numbers leave outIn a July 2025 parliamentary reply, the Union environment ministry estimated that India generated approximately 13.98 lakh tonnes of e-waste in 2024-25. It reported that 70.71% was collected, dismantled, recycled or disposed of. Yet in August 2024, the same ministry told the Rajya Sabha that the government did not have an estimate of the proportion of e-waste handled by the informal sector. Without such an estimate, these figures cannot tell us how much informal workers contribute to the recycling economy or how much material remains outside documented channels.The methodology matters too. The Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) estimates national e-waste generation from two inputs: countrywide sales data supplied by registered producers and the average life of notified electrical and electronic equipment. That raises a particular question for fast tech. The WEEE Forum notes that low-cost electronics are increasingly sold through online platforms and sellers that may not be registered as producers under national e-waste regimes. An estimate built on registered producers’ reporting needs to explain how it accounts for equipment sold outside that system. Nor does a recycling percentage tell us how many workers collected and prepared that material, what they earned or under what conditions they worked. Hand dismantling does not, by itself, prove that recycling is fictitious. But a recycling certificate does not establish that the workers supplying the chain were fairly paid or adequately protected. India needs transparent material accounting. It also needs labour accounting. When material becomes visible before workersUnder the E-Waste (Management) Rules, 2022, producers fulfil their Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) obligations through certificates generated by registered recyclers. CPCB’s guidance sets recycling targets of 60% for 2023-24 and 2024-25, 70% for 2025-26 and 2026-27, and 80% from 2027-28 onwards. The EPR portal registers manufacturers, producers, refurbishers and recyclers. Dismantlers fall within the rules’ scope, but are not required to register on the portal. Registered recyclers can also buy e-waste from informal sellers and CPCB lets them document such purchases with receipts bearing the sellers’ names and addresses.Informal workers, then, are not entirely invisible. Their material can enter the documented chain. But recording an informal seller’s supply does not guarantee workers a share of the revenue generated through EPR certificates. Copper can become legible before the worker does. A receipt records a transaction. It does not show whether the seller had bargaining power, whether the workplace was safe or whether a worker could seek treatment without losing income. Moving more material to registered recyclers is the easy part. The harder question is whether the people who collect, sort, and prepare it gain any rights in the process. A price dispute without labourOne prominent dispute over e-waste policy concerns the cost of producer compliance. CPCB’s pricing framework established a floor price of Rs 22 per kilogram for EPR certificates in the relevant consumer electrical and electronic equipment category. Major manufacturers, including Samsung and LG, challenged the pricing regime in court in 2025, arguing that prices should be left to the market.The dispute continued into 2026. In December 2025, the Delhi high court temporarily stayed a new CPCB requirement that companies declare compliance with minimum certificate prices, following a challenge by Blue Star. Meanwhile, a June 2025 Newslaundry investigation reported a reverse auction by Johnson Controls-Hitachi in which bids fell below the government floor, including one at Rs 5.90 per kilogram. These are prices associated with EPR compliance. They are neither workers’ wages nor necessarily what anyone pays for discarded electronics. That distinction is important. A producer-responsibility system must finance genuine collection and processing. But the argument over what producers pay recyclers leaves another question unresolved: what reaches the workers who sustain the collection and dismantling chain?A higher certificate price does not automatically mean better earnings for collectors, safer workplaces for dismantlers or access to occupational healthcare. If worker protection is an objective of producer responsibility, it needs an explicit mechanism. It cannot depend on the hope that benefits will trickle down the material chain.Protection without dispossessionNone of this is an argument for preserving hazardous recycling in the name of livelihoods. The health risks are real. The World Health Organisation (WHO) identifies open burning, acid leaching and unsafe dismantling as practices that can release toxic pollutants into air, soil, dust and water. Fast tech brings additional risks. Many small electronic devices contain lithium-ion batteries that can catch fire when crushed or punctured. According to the findings cited by WEEE Forum’s Batteries Roundtable, 36% of e-waste operators reported experiencing a battery-related fire in their facilities over the preceding year. Workers should not have to choose between income and health. Nor should recognising hazardous conditions become an excuse for treating workers themselves as the problem. India’s e-waste framework assigns governments responsibilities for workers’ skills, safety and health. Governments should regularly and publicly report how many workers receive safety training, what occupational-health services are available in dismantling clusters and what happens when screening identifies harmful exposure. Testing without access to treatment merely produces another number. A worker-centred approach would make protection an explicit cost of producer responsibility. One possibility is to earmark part of EPR financing for safer collection and dismantling facilities, occupational healthcare and worker training, with independent monitoring and worker participation. Collectors’ cooperatives and worker collectives could become paid collection partners, able to negotiate with authorised recyclers. Recognition should mean transparent payments and a real say, backed by grievance mechanisms. A receipt showing where material came from is not enough.Pune’s SWaCH offers an instructive precedent. The worker-owned cooperative integrates waste pickers into organised waste collection and provides e-waste collection services. It is not an e-waste EPR model, but it shows that organised waste management can include workers rather than displace them.Repair comes beforeRecycling targets can obscure another kind of labour: repair. Julia Corwin’s Analog Labour in a Digital World: E-Waste in India and the Politics of Repair examines skilled repair, remanufacturing and informal trade as integral to electronics economies and value creation. Her work complicates the assumption that a device’s afterlife begins only when a recycler receives it. A meaningful right-to-repair regime should make spare parts and service information accessible and remove unnecessary barriers to independent repair. Repair workers should help shape it and their knowledge should inform policy.International E-Waste Day asks us to notice small electronics that are easy to buy and discard. India should also notice the people whose work gives those products an afterlife. India has learned to count tonnes and certificates. It has yet to count workers. Recognition must mean fair payment, protection and a voice in how the system operates. Fast tech is fast because someone else pays its slow costs. Sumanta Roy is a PhD student at the Department of Anthropology, Washington State University, USA.