The ministry’s rationale for denial is that the vintage and residual life of such refurbished electrical and electronic equipment (EEE) imports would later add to the e-waste burden of the country.
Amitav Ranjan
Taking a firm stand against electronic waste generation, the environment ministry has denied permission to Apple, IBM, Nokia, Honeywell and Hewlett-Packard, among others, for importing used equipment and parts into India.
The ministry’s rationale for denial is that the vintage and residual life of such refurbished electrical and electronic equipment (EEE) imports would later add to the e-waste burden of the country.
“The items proposed to be imported are known to have short functional life and are prone to become obsolete in a short period of time. Therefore, generation of e-waste would become quicker in the country,” says a ministry note. At best, the country could support products that were manufactured less than three years ago and had at least five years of residual life left, says the ministry’s draft guidelines.
Apple had sought permission to import one lakh used I-phones and 2.5 lakh I-pads to explore the Indian market for “refurbished EEE”. These products, it said, are sold as “Apple Certified-PreOwned” after repair by its original equipment manufacturer.
Its proposal was formally turned down by the Technical Review Committee on July 2 on grounds that it would add to the country’s e-waste. The other reason was that India did not allow import of old consumer electronic items like mobile, laptops, televisions etc for trading.
Others like IBM India, HP India and Honeywell Technology had applied for import of used servers, storage equipment, networking products and other electronic goods for testing and providing worldwide support with some offering to re-export within three years.
“The monitoring with respect to re-export after one year is not feasible in the present context. Further, it is noted that manufacturing date (of the import) is not being considered as an essential criteria for such cases for re-export,” argued the ministry. “Accordingly, all such cases are rejected,” it ruled in May. Nokia Solutions and Networks was declined permission to import 62 electronic and electrical accessories and later Alcatel and Ericsson were not allowed to import 1,703 telecom networking and 1,000 functional fan control units, respectively. NEC Technologies were also disallowed to import five “second-hand” servers and standard accessories from the US.
The ministry’s green stance comes after years of unrestricted imports such as permission to HP last October to import 311,398 units of refurbished parts for warranty replacement with the condition that defective component in equal number would be exported prior to import.
Flextronics Technologies was allowed last February to import 146,954 refurbished hard disk drives for warranty replacement with similar re-export condition.