Weeks before I hit the ground, my editor Raman Kirpal's brief was clean and cold: check the books of India's top recyclers, and then corroborate their numbers with legwork. 

With insights from my sources, I learned what to look for in the financial and regulatory paper trails left by recyclers. I started tracking everything: land size, revenues, staff and electricity expenditure, fixed assets, especially machinery – anything I could access. No detail was too small.

By then, I had a satisfactory understanding of the operational, financial, and regulatory aspects of the e-waste recycling business. Understanding a subject is mandatory for a journalist, but it is never sufficient. Pre-reporting helped me narrow the field to 5-10 suspected recycling companies. 

For almost a month, from May to June 2025, I was on the road. When I returned to Delhi, I had visited more than 40 recycling units across four states. We set out to show a trend. Instead, we found a systemic rot entrenched across the world's third-largest producer of e-waste.

What followed was a three-part investigative series on the e-waste recycling fraud. 

Here’s a quick recap of the major findings: 

Three-fourths of the units I visited were inactive, non-existent, or involved in other irregularities. They accounted for one-third of the country’s e-waste recycling sector – an astonishing share. And yet they earned crores in carbon credits – extended producer responsibility (EPR) certificates in the government’s lexicon – issued to help electronics firms meet their statutory recycling obligations. Within the industry and the government, this was an open secret.

Uncovering the story

Pre-reporting had little adrenaline to offer – just reams of documents and calls for clarification on recycling laws. 

The first units I visited were in Meerut and Bulandshahr. I had selected only 5 or 10 suspected firms, but I was unprepared for the scale of what I saw. Facilities approved by pollution boards did not exist. Others were running businesses other than recycling.

In the first week of the road trip, I understood that carbon credit fraud had not merely infiltrated the sector – it had consumed it. Hardly any unit appeared active. There were days when I drove to an official-sounding address and arrived at a lane that looked like nothing – a place where industry was supposed to roar, but instead offered only the hollow sound of absence.

Every morning in my hotel room, I would wake up swarmed with nervous excitement. Would I get information on men and machines? If I was denied, what were the other ways – legal ways – to do it? The story demanded a whole body of proof.

Information gathering was painstaking. I was always on the lookout for an inconspicuous corner from where I could monitor a facility. At many sites, surveillance lasted three or four days, eight to ten hours a day. The work was repetitive in a way that makes you doubt your own sanity: you return to the same patch of road, the same tea stall, the same bend in a canal-side track. Amid all of this, I had to remain alert. But the real challenge was staying invisible while doing it.

In Uttar Pradesh’s Meerut district, for example, we found over 15 e-waste recycling units near one village. Going by these numbers, you would expect that sleepy place to come alive: workers streaming in, machines whirring and screeching, the air thick with activity. But it never came to life. The roads were empty, except for trucks running in circles within a 500-meter radius.

We had to chase them. After my driver was confronted by a group of people, I asked him to stay away from the area for the time being. Also, our car had a Delhi-registered number that made us conspicuous. So, he helped me arrange a bike for surveillance. 

On a bike, I followed trucks as they came out of these recycling facilities, parked at Dharmkantas (weighing bridges), and returned. I noted the time of exit and entry, along with registration numbers. The pattern soon became too neat to ignore. Trucks would return to plants after being weighed, then leave again and return in no time.

This, I realised, was a ploy: to show the government that facilities were receiving fresh e-waste from different vendors – a regulatory precursor to claim EPR certificates. There were occasions when several trucks simultaneously exited or returned to different facilities.

In Uttar Pradesh, most of the recycling facilities were flanked by agricultural fields in nondescript villages. Locating them was another task, even though I had their official addresses. They were set away from the public gaze: along a canal, near an industrial drain, and far into agricultural solitude. Their invisibility felt intentional. I tried to match it with my own.

A strange encounter

At one facility in Haryana, that invisibility broke. I became visible – innocuously, almost politely – because I spoke to workers and neighbouring factories. It became more problematic because I was travelling in a Delhi-registered car – the second car I was using for legwork. For the next two days, I navigated my way around the facility on a Haryana-registered bike. 

At one point, I found a vantage spot a few yards from the factory: a boundary wall skirting an agricultural field. I sat there through working hours, noting workers entering the factory and the movement of trucks. By late afternoon, the owner – or caretaker – of the field spotted me.

“What are you doing there? Come down,” he shouted.

Jolted, I jumped down.

“Leave right now or else I will bash you up,” he threatened.

He wasn’t even ready to let me stand on the dirt road. I didn’t tell him he couldn’t force me out of the area. I didn’t argue. I didn’t push back. With my head bowed, I left. I knew any confrontation would create a ruckus that would jeopardise two days of labour. The next day, I returned to the rigour as usual, but avoided the boundary wall.

For some reason, the incident left an indelible imprint on my mind. I've thought about why this moment stayed with me. Maybe it was humiliation. Perhaps it was a bruised ego. Or maybe it was the sudden clarity of how fragile this work is: how easily a momentary outburst can undo months of quiet diligence.

Putting it all together

By the time I returned to Delhi, I carried a mountain of evidence of how recycling facilities had gamed the laws, and how regulators weren’t doing their jobs. Financial records corroborated the on-ground findings. Downloading these records from the Ministry of Corporate Affairs website required a different kind of endurance. Most of the time, the site would be under maintenance or crash midway. The best time to do it was at night when traffic was low.

No story is easy. Each demands its own kind of rigour. Unlike other journalistic scoops, this investigation had to be built from scratch. It was time-consuming. It required patience and persistence, the sort that feels thankless until the story is published.

The three-month persistence paid off when Newslaundry published the first part of the investigative series on July 30. Weeks after the second part, the central government notified the New Environment Audit Rules, under which third-party auditors would monitor industries and EPR compliance, among other measures.

A journalist’s job, someone once said, is to keep throwing pebbles into the water, whether they cause ripples or not. Still, every journalist, if they are honest, carries the same quiet desire for ripples.

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