Every year, as Diwali approaches, I begin my annual ritual of cleaning – opening drawers, cupboards, and those mysterious “boxes of everything” we all seem to have. It starts as an act of tidying up, but it always turns into a little journey of rediscovery. Among the old receipts and forgotten keys, I always find a jumble of forgotten gadgets – tangled chargers, obsolete cables, a fitness band that stopped syncing years ago, a cracked phone protector, two mismatched earphones, and sometimes a remote whose device I can’t even remember.

They lie quietly all year, invisible. But during Diwali ki safai, they resurface; silent reminders of how much we own, use, and discard without a second thought. That’s when it hits me: this isn’t just clutter. It’s the hidden face of e-waste: the part of our digital lives we rarely notice.

More than just phones and laptops
When we think of e-waste, we picture phones, TVs, laptops, maybe a refrigerator or two. But the reality goes far beyond that. Under India’s E-Waste (Management) Rules, 2022, the number of officially recognized e-waste categories has grown from 21 to 106 items.

That includes LED bulbs, routers, medical equipment, digital toys, solar panels, electric tools, and even grooming devices. Surprising, right? Most of us can’t name half of these 106 items; yet we use them every single day. India now produces over 1.4 million metric tonnes of e-waste every year. And that number grows with every “new launch,” every “limited-time offer,” every Diwali sale we can’t resist.

The life we don’t see
To truly understand e-waste, we need to understand the life of our gadgets – what happens before and after we use them. It starts far away, in mines and factories where metals like copper, cobalt, lithium, nickel, and gold are extracted. Each of these comes with a cost forests cleared, water polluted, communities displaced. After assembly and sale, the device lands in our hands – the only part of its journey we actually see. But when we stop using it, that story doesn’t end.

If not repaired, reused, or recycled responsibly, it often ends up in informal scrapyards dismantled by hand, wires burned, acids used to extract metals. What’s left behind? Toxic fumes, contaminated soil, and poisoned groundwater that silently affect lives for generations. The story of e-waste isn’t just about where gadgets go it’s about how long we let them live.

Your phone suddenly stops updating, your laptop battery fades in two years, your printer refuses non-branded cartridges that’s planned obsolescence, where products are built to fail faster so we buy replacements sooner.

Then there’s perceived obsolescence, when the device still works perfectly fine, but we want the newer, sleeker one. The one with the better camera. The one everyone’s talking about. This constant urge to “upgrade” comes with invisible costs; environmental, financial, even moral. Every new device means more mining, more waste, more strain on a planet already under pressure.

We’ve turned convenience into consumption – and consumption into habit.

Recycling: The last step, not the first
We often comfort ourselves with the thought, “At least I recycle.” But here’s what we don’t talk about enough recycling is the last resort, not the first solution. Recycling consumes energy, involves complex processes, and can still create pollution if done poorly. In India, less than 25% of e-waste is formally recycled – the rest ends up in informal markets.

Before recycling, there are smaller, smarter steps:

Repair what you can give it a longer life.

Reuse or donate what still works.

Refurbish or repurpose creatively.

Recycle responsibly only when there’s truly no other option.

It’s not about doing less. It’s about doing better. 

Responsibility beyond the factory
India’s e-waste policy rightly puts responsibility on producers but the truth is, accountability doesn’t end at the factory gate. Because while companies make the products, we make the choices. We decide when to upgrade, how long to hold on, and where to dispose of what we no longer need. Every one of those choices ripples outward to our families, our communities, our ecosystems.

We can’t outsource that responsibility to anyone else not even the government. The circular story of sustainability needs all of us.

This Diwali, as we clean our homes and light our diyas, maybe we can also clean our digital lives opening those forgotten drawers, finding those unused gadgets, and deciding consciously what their next life should be. Because understanding the life cycle of our gadgets isn’t just about knowing how they’re made – it’s about taking responsibility for what happens after.

The earth does not need to upgrade our habits do.

Shohini Dutta is Chief Philanthropy Officer, Bajaj Foundation.

Photo credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Decorative_Diwali_rangoli_in_goa.JPG