Two Days Training Programme on E-waste for GAIL Officials

Trained by Sustainable Industrialization Team 
Centre for Science and Environment

at GAIL Training Institute

A two day training programme on e-waste has been conducted by the CSE team for the Gail officials. The programme was held during 22-23rd of February, 2016. A total of 15 officials from across India GAIL units attended the programme.

The programme was aimed at imparting training on various provisions of e-waste. Initially the programme started with an interactive session with the participants, where in the participants expressed their expectation from the programme. This was followed by technical presentation sessions on various component of e-waste. Swati Singh and Kankana Das of CSE took the session on the major concern of e-waste and the E-waste rule of 2011 and draft 2015 rule respectively. Dr. Ashish Chaturvedi discussed about the EPR and the role of bulk consumer in managing the e-waste and scope of various disposal technique of discarded e-waste. A session on various e-waste collection mechanism that can be adopted by a bulk consumer like GAIL was also discussed by Rachna Arora of GIZ. A separate session on the scope of IEC campaign was also taken by Rachna Arora and Titiksha Fernandez where in they have highlighted the need for IEC campaigning even by the bulk consumer in order to make their surroundings aware of the issue. It was discussed that if such kind of IEC campaigning can be done through the CSR initiative of the company. 

The programme finally ended up with a class exercise on formulating an action plan for the e-waste generated from various office facility, site office and township of GAIL.

Immediate Impact:

The discussion made some of the officials to think about the extent of the issue and some suggestions that came from the participants included:

1. Company policy individual printer-scanner per person needs to be changed and a common printer-scanner must be put in place floor wise;

2. E-waste disposal mechanism through auctioning system can be changed, as it causes back door illegal channelization of e-waste; however this decision can not be taken by them until senior level officials take the onus of changing the company policy;

3. Some of the participants mentioned that this type of programme should be meant for the officers responsible for the decision makers and not for them as they are hardly involved in any decision making process.