Air pollution is the largest environmental health threat India faces, and the numbers moved again this year. The State of Global Air 2025 report attributes more than 2 million Indian deaths in 2023 to air pollution, up 43% since 2000. The Lancet Countdown 2025 links 1.72 million deaths in 2022 to human-made fine particles alone, and values that loss at US$339.4 billion, 9.5% of GDP.

India’s official e-waste figures describe a system that is improving quickly on paper. Generation is rising, formal processing is rising faster, and the regulatory architecture has expanded to cover a wide product range. Read alone, the numbers suggest a problem being brought under control. Read against what happens at the point of disposal, they describe something more complicated, a formal system that is growing while the material it needs continues to flow somewhere else.

Most plastic that reaches the ocean does not travel there directly. It moves through drains, nullahs and small urban rivers that pass within a few kilometres of the households and businesses that discarded it. This is a structural insight rather than a rhetorical one: it means the leakage point is geographically concentrated, physically accessible, and therefore something a corporate programme can actually be sited against. Interception at the waterway is the last point in the chain where a tonne of escaped plastic can still be captured, which is why river plastic recovery sits where it does in the waste hierarchy.