Chasing Tales

An acceptable genocide

The past
In Karachi, the Edhi Foundation— Pakistan’s largest social welfare organisation — installed cradles outside the gates of its orphanage with a sign reading: Don’t kill the baby, leave the baby alive in the cradle. A newborn girl was found in one of those cradles. Her entire body was blackened. She had been burnt alive, umbilical cord still attached.¹

Of the babies recovered from those cradles, more than 90% are girls.²

In 1990, the Indian economist Amartya Sen published an essay in The New York Review of Books titled “More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing.” The phrase was new. The practice was ancient.³

Sen had noticed something in the census data: across Asia, there were far fewer women than there should be. Women who should have existed did not exist. They had been removed. Female infants are more resilient than male infants, and women outlive men on a level biological playing field.³ Sen called this “missing”. By his original estimate: 100 million. Later research revised the figure upward.

In Classical Greece, fewer than 1% of families documented at Delphi around 200 BCE had two or more daughters.⁴ Daughters were exposed — left outside, on hillsides and in public places, to die of cold and hunger.⁵

In ancient Rome, the practice was routine and documented without shame. In 1 BCE, a Roman man named Hilarion wrote a letter from Alexandria to his pregnant wife Alis. The letter was found on papyrus in Egypt, preserved by dry sand for two thousand years. It reads: if it is a male, let it live; if it is a female, expose it.⁶

In China, Christian missionaries in the sixteenth century documented newborn girls thrown into rivers. In Qing dynasty texts, the term ni nü — “to drown girls” — appears as a routine domestic description.⁷ Drowning, suffocation, starvation, and exposure in baskets placed in trees were all documented methods of eliminating female newborns (A caveat: western missionary accounts, particularly Gabriel Palatre’s widely reproduced 1878 statistics, have been shown to be significantly erroneous — shaped partly by an exoticizing Western gaze that made female infanticide into a “totemic marker of Chinese society.”⁸

The Quran explicitly prohibits female infanticide. It prohibits it perhaps because it was common enough in pre-Islamic Arabia to require prohibition?⁹ The Vedic and ancient Hindu texts of India reference son preference.¹⁰ ¹¹ ¹² Roman law referenced it (it went from a father’s right to capital crime).¹³ ¹⁴ The practice predates every modern state, every modern religion in its current form, and every technology we associate with it.

Sex-selective abortion leaves a specific statistical signature that makes it distinguishable from random variation. In families practising sex selection, ratios at first and second births tend to be close to normal. The distortion appears and amplifies at third and fourth births — specifically in families that have not yet produced a son.¹⁵ ¹⁶ ¹⁷

A five-year study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences¹⁵ in 2019 compiled 10,835 observations across 202 countries and identified twelve countries with statistically significant sex ratio distortions attributable specifically to sex-selective abortion: China, India, Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, South Korea, Hong Kong, Montenegro, Taiwan, Tunisia, and Vietnam. Of 23 million¹⁸ girls selectively aborted since 1970, 11.9 million were in China and 10.6 million in India. In 2017 alone, 800,000 girls were aborted in China and 671,000 in India. The most recent count, tracking the accumulation since 1970 across twelve countries, is an estimated 142 million “missing” girls and women.¹⁹

Across centuries and cultures, societies have eliminated girls and women.

The logic
In research from 2008, the economist Nancy Qian studied what happened in rural China when the market price of tea rose — because tea-picking rewards the fine motor skills at which women are thought to excel. When female income increased by US$7.70 — roughly ten per cent of average rural household income — the survival rate of girls rose by a full percentage point. When orchard fruit values rose in regions where men dominate the labour, no equivalent improvement occurred.²⁰

Esther Duflo, in her 2012 survey of the relationship between women’s empowerment and economic development published in the Journal of Economic Literature, documented the same mechanism from the other direction in research which also synthesised from Elaina Rose’s 1999 paper “Consumption Smoothing and Excess Female Mortality in Rural India”.²¹ ²² In India, excess female child mortality — deaths of girls that would not have occurred if girls received care equal to boys — spikes during droughts.²³ When a household faces an income shock, girls are the first to be deprioritised.

Most of the 142 million were not aborted. They were neglected into death after they were born — fed less, treated less, counted less.

Abhijit Banerjee and Duflo’s research on how poor households actually make decisions — rather than how economists assume they do — found that the logic driving these outcomes is not irrational within the terms of the society producing it.²⁴ A son carries the family name, inherits property, provides old-age support, and stays. A daughter, under the systems of inheritance and marriage that govern the societies where missing women cluster most densely, functionally becomes the property of her husband’s family upon marriage.²⁴ The parents who fed and educated her receive nothing.²⁴

Their conclusion, after reviewing decades of evidence, is that economic development alone does not fix this. Economic growth does not automatically raise the value of girls. In India, the sex ratio distortion has been worst in the wealthiest states. Punjab and Haryana — India’s richest agricultural states — have among the lowest sex ratios in the country.²⁵ Ultrasound arrived with prosperity, and prosperity enabled families who previously killed girls after birth to instead eliminate them before. Sen called it “high-tech sexism”.²⁶ Duflo characterises it as a market failure that requires “continuous policy commitment to equality for its own sake,”²⁷ because no invisible hand will correct it.

The numbers are not abstract.

In India — where Duflo documented girls being deprioritised first in every household income shock — the national sex ratio is 900 girls per 1,000 boys;²⁸ in Haryana, India’s wealthiest agricultural state, it is 831;²⁸ India’s own Economic Survey counts 63 million missing women,²⁹ and every year 239,000 girls under five die because of their gender (2000-2005).³⁰
In China, the one-child policy combined with ultrasound produced sex ratios of 117 males per 100 females in 2001;³¹ an estimated 11.9 million girls were selectively aborted between 1970 and 2020;¹⁵ the total missing across all causes is 40 million; and the demographic surplus of men left behind has a name — guang gun, “bare branches,” men who will never find wives because their generation’s women were removed before birth.³²³³
In Pakistan, 18% of survey respondents said they did not want even one daughter; the average desired number of sons was 3.05, the average desired number of daughters was 1.15.³⁴ ³⁵
Vietnam’s sex ratio reached 112 in 2006, rising from a natural baseline of 105 in just five years — faster than China or South Korea at their peaks.³⁶
Azerbaijan reached 116 males per 100 females. Twelve countries across five continents, four major religions, every income bracket.³⁷ ³⁸

The variable they share is not poverty, not religion, not geography. It is the uncorrected price of a girl.

In October 2023, the UK Office for National Statistics published data analysed by the Department of Health and Social Care.³⁹ Other research found a statistically significant imbalance in births to Indian mothers in the United Kingdom between 2021 and 2025: 118 boys born for every 100 girls, against a national average of 105. At third births specifically, the ratio reached 118:100 in both 2023–24 and 2024–25.⁴⁰ Researchers estimate approximately 400 sex-selective abortions occurred in the UK between 2017 and 2021,³⁹ a statistically significant imbalance consistent with patterns of sex selection.

The present
South Korea is the one country in the twelve that has demonstrably reversed the trend.⁴¹ A sustained government campaign, legal enforcement against illegal sex determination, and a genuine cultural shift in women’s economic participation produced a measurable normalisation of its sex ratio.⁴² It is the evidence that this is reversible.

The burnt girl in Karachi was the inheritor of her foremother’s legacy of being burnt for being women- whether at the stake, or on their dead husbands’ pyres. But something new happened in South Korea. The women who were not eliminated made a decision: They called it the 4B movement: bihon, bichulsan, biyeonae, bisekseu — no marriage, no childbirth, no dating, no sex.⁴³ South Korea’s total fertility rate fell to 0.72 in 2023 — the lowest ever recorded by any country on earth.⁴⁴ The UN projects its population of 51 million will halve by the end of this century.⁴⁵ The government has spent over $200 billion in sixteen years on pro-natalist policies — childcare subsidies, mortgages for newlywed couples, extended parental leave.⁴⁶ ⁴⁷ The women are not interested.

Sources

Carbon Markets 101 – Introduction

An externality is an economic term for a cost (or benefit) that spills over to people who didn’t cause it and aren’t compensated for it. When a coal power plant generates electricity, the plant’s owner counts the cost of coal, labour, equipment, and maintenance. But the plant doesn’t count the cost of the pollution it releases. Those costs exist; they’re just borne by everyone else but not reflected in the price of electricity: put simply, the price of electricity is too low because it doesn’t account for the true social cost of its production. The market has failed. Economists call this a “market failure” (imaginative).¹

In theory, the “cap-and-trade” system would allow markets to figure out the cheapest way to cut emissions. This theory was tested first on acid rain in the United States, and it worked. Factories that could cheaply reduce sulfur dioxide did so and sold their excess reduction “rights” to factories where reduction was expensive. Total sulfur dioxide fell.² ³ Costs were lower than if every factory had been forced to reduce by the same percentage.⁴ This mechanism is explained here.

At the moment, there are two distinct carbon markets operating simultaneously:

The compliance market, where governments make the rules; and
The voluntary market (which is… voluntary)

Within each of these, there are many different programmes and trading systems, but almost everything you hear described as “carbon trading” sits in one of these two buckets.

The compliance market
For example, a government decides that all power plants, cement factories, and steel mills (or whatever sectors it targets) must collectively emit no more than a certain amount of carbon in a given year. This total is the “cap.” The government then divides the cap into “allowances”—each allowance permits one tonne of CO₂ emission. These allowances are either given free to companies or sold at auction (that depends on the design of this new regulation).

Now here’s where the trade happens. At the end of the year:

A factory that emitted less than its allowance can sell its extra allowances to another factory.
A factory that emitted more than its allowance must buy extra allowances from others, or face heavy penalties.

The result: a market price for carbon emerges based on supply and demand. Companies facing high costs to reduce emissions buy allowances from companies where reduction is cheap. Total emissions stay within the cap. Abatement happens where it costs least.

Examples are the EU ETS,⁵ and the California cap-and-trade markets.⁶

The voluntary market
Here, there’s no government mandate. Instead, companies and individuals can choose to buy carbon credits to offset their emissions as part of their net-zero pledges, ESG commitments, or sustainability branding.

In the voluntary market, someone identifies a project that reduces or removes carbon—perhaps reforestation in Indonesia, a wind farm in India, or a methane capture system at a landfill in Brazil.⁷ The project is audited by a third party to verify that it genuinely reduces carbon.⁷ If it does, the project is issued carbon credits. Each credit represents one tonne of CO₂ equivalent reduction or removal.⁸ ⁹

Say, a company in London that wants to offset its emissions can then buy these credits—perhaps from an Indonesian reforestation project. The company retires the credits (removes them from circulation permanently, so they can only be used once- this means credits generated by the reforestation project up until that moment were used up and only newly generated credits can be used from now on),¹⁰ effectively claiming that its emissions have been offset by trees planted elsewhere (no double counting).¹¹

On the surface, this seems elegant: emissions reductions happen where they’re cheap, capital flows to developing countries that need investment in clean energy and conservation, and companies take responsibility for their carbon footprint. In theory, both market mechanisms align economic incentive with environmental goal.

In practice, let’s see how this actually worked out.

Who would have thought.
If you bought carbon credits in 2020 to offset your company’s emissions, what you almost certainly received was a credit from an “avoidance” project.¹² An avoidance project is a carbon offset project that stops emissions from happening in the future, rather than removing carbon that’s already in the atmosphere—something like renewable energy, or methane capture at a landfill.¹³ These credits were cheap, often just a few dollars per tonne, and they dominated the voluntary market.¹⁴ Besides, someone can also always open a new landfill, which generates methane regardless of the credit market.

The core problem with avoidance projects (and why they dominate low-quality carbon markets):

Additionality is hard to prove: Additionality is the concept that a project only gets carbon revenue if there is proof that it would not exist without carbon revenue.¹⁵ This is obviously difficult to prove, since no one can prove a counterfactual.¹⁶ So, did the wind farm only get built because of carbon credits? Or would it have been built anyway because wind is now cheaper to build wind farms and there are regulatory incentives for both producers and consumers of wind energy? If the latter, you’re issuing credits for something that would have happened regardless, and it is an inefficient use of precious climate money.¹⁷
They’re cheaper to credit: A wind farm in India might cost $50 million, generate carbon credits, and people will buy them for $5/tonne because they’re plentiful and easy to verify.¹⁸ Compare that to a “removal” project (direct air capture, or verified reforestation) that might cost $300-600/tonne but is genuinely rare and harder to fake.¹⁹ ²⁰
They create perverse incentives: If a cement factory can buy avoidance credits instead of upgrading its own equipment, why upgrade? The credits let you stay dirty.²¹ ²²

There is also the matter of currency exchange rates. For example, if a project developer in India earns carbon credits and sells them in dollars or euros, they get a currency arbitrage bonus when converting back to rupees. This creates extra incentive to maximise credit issuance, even if the climate impact is questionable.

There are more than a few cases:

In 2022, the NewClimate Institute and Carbon Market Watch conducted a detailed audit of the net-zero pledges of 25 of the world’s largest companies—including Amazon, Google, and Walmart. Their findings were stark: the companies’ headline pledges, on average, only committed to actually reduce emissions by 40%—not the 100% their “net-zero” branding implied. Of the 25 companies, 22 received ratings of either “low” or “very low” integrity. Almost all of them planned to use offsetting credits of varying quality to paper over the gap.²³
In 2024, researchers publishing in Nature Communications analysed the carbon credit purchases of the twenty largest corporate buyers in the voluntary carbon market — including Microsoft, Google, and Amazon — covering the period from 2020 to 2023. They found that 87% of the credits these companies bought carried a high risk of not providing real, additional emissions reductions.²⁴
In one notorious case, chemical manufacturers in China and India deliberately overproduced a potent refrigerant which is a greenhouse gas (HCFC-22, to generate HFC-23 as a byproduct) for no reason other than to destroy it and claim lucrative carbon credits. The practice was eventually curtailed, but it exposed how badly designed crediting rules can actively increase emissions. The fact that this ended only after regulators intervened is proof that market incentives alone are not enough.²⁵ ²⁶

This pattern reveals a fundamental problem with the voluntary carbon market: the market has incentivised volume and price, not integrity.²⁷ Companies with net-zero commitments needed credits fast and cheap. Sellers of credits had incentive to issue as many credits as possible.²⁸ Verification bodies—the third parties meant to audit projects—often lacked independence or rigorous methodology.²⁹ ³⁰ The result was a flood of low-quality credits.³¹

Offsetting vs. Reduction
Beyond fraud and greenwashing, there’s a more fundamental critique of carbon markets, especially the voluntary market: offsetting does not reduce emissions; it merely allows you to claim you did while someone else cuts instead.³²

Climate science is unambiguous on this point: we need to reduce absolute greenhouse gas emissions.³³ If we’re to have any chance of limiting warming to 1.5°C, global emissions need to drop dramatically and rapidly. The window is closing. With the world’s remaining carbon budget for 1.5°C likely exhausted by 2029,³⁴ ³⁵ there is no time for accounting tricks. For a deeper understanding of this, you can read this, and this.

When you buy a carbon credit, you’re ~~typically~~ hopefully buying a reduction that would not happen without the credit. But if the world is serious about climate action, then all reductions should be happening anyway—not because someone paid for them, but because governments have set binding targets or regulations that force them. This creates what researchers call a “delay effect”: by allowing companies and countries to buy offsets instead of reducing at home, carbon markets can actually weaken direct climate action.³⁶ A company might decide: why invest in energy efficiency when we can just buy cheap credits? A country might decide: why transition away from coal when we can buy credits from other countries?

The deeper problem with offsetting is not ethical but physical. Most offsets allow emissions to happen now in exchange for a promise of reduction or removal later.³¹ But climate damage is driven by cumulative emissions over time, not by accounting balances. A tonne of CO₂ emitted today does immediate and irreversible work in the atmosphere: it traps heat, accelerates feedback loops, and eats into the remaining carbon budget while it is most scarce. Promised future removals—whether from trees that may burn or technologies that may not ever happen—do not undo that damage in the critical near term. Offsetting assumes that emissions across time are fungible; climate physics does not. From the perspective of the climate system, emitting now and “neutralising” later is not equivalent to not emitting in the first place.³⁷

Article 6
Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, operationalised in 2024³⁸ creates two pathways for international carbon trading:

Article 6.2 allows countries to trade emission reductions bilaterally. Country A reduces emissions and sells the reduction to Country B, which counts it toward its Paris Agreement target.³⁹
Article 6.4 creates a centralised UN-supervised market, similar to the CDM but with supposedly stronger safeguards against fraud and double-counting.⁴⁰

This has happened before. Under the Kyoto Protocol, the main international offset scheme was the Clean Development Mechanism, or CDM.⁴¹ However, Article 6 permits legacy credits from the CDM—the very scheme that was riddled with systemic failures⁴²—to be transferred into the new market. This means all the problematic reductions from discredited projects can continue to be traded under a new label. There are an estimated 2-5 billion⁴³ unused CDM credits sitting in registries (we don’t know the exact figures, or even a close estimate, that’s just the state of the industry at the minute). An honest carbon market would not include these. Moreover, there is already evidence that countries are using Article 6 not to supplement domestic emission reductions but to substitute for them.⁴⁴ Wealthier nations are buying cheap credits instead of pursuing binding, domestic decarbonisation.

Is there something better?
Given all the problems, why do carbon markets persist?

First, they’re better than the alternative that was on the table:⁴⁵ ⁴⁶ When countries negotiated the Kyoto Protocol, the question wasn’t “should we have carbon markets or not?” It was “how do we get countries to commit to emission reductions at all?” Carbon markets, by offering flexibility and cost-effectiveness, made it politically possible for countries to agree to binding targets.
Second, they mobilise capital:⁴⁷ ⁴⁸ ⁴⁹ The voluntary carbon market, flawed as it is, has channeled billions of dollars into clean energy, reforestation, and conservation projects in developing countries. That capital likely wouldn’t exist without the market—it wouldn’t exist as development aid or climate finance in that volume.
Third, they create a price signal:⁵⁰ ⁵¹ By putting a price on carbon—even an imperfect one—markets have shifted some business behavior.
Fourth, there’s no consensus on the alternative: Some argue for pure regulation—carbon taxes, efficiency mandates, technology bans. Others argue for direct public investment in the clean energy transition.⁵² Some combination of all three is likely needed. But the question of how much regulation versus how much market remains genuinely contested among serious climate economists.⁵³ Carbon markets represent a compromise position: market mechanisms with increasing regulatory guardrails.

None of this implies that voluntary offsetting can substitute for domestic emissions cuts; carbon markets can only play a supporting role once those cuts are underway. Carbon markets should be treated as a supporting tool, not a primary solution. Their most appropriate role is in marginal abatement—financing emissions reductions or removals that are otherwise prohibitively expensive, after binding domestic caps and regulatory measures ensure all major emitters reduce at home.

So why isn’t carbon reduction mandatory?
There are three overlapping answers: politics, power, and timing.

1. Strong climate policy creates very visible losers and mostly invisible winners⁵⁴

A high carbon price or hard cap raises energy and fuel costs in the short term, which hits households and energy‑intensive industries directly.⁵⁵ ⁵⁶
The benefits—less climate damage in 2040, fewer heatwaves in 2050—are diffuse, delayed, and hard to attribute to any single law.⁵⁷

2. Concentrated interests vs. diffuse publics

Then there’s power. Fossil fuel companies, energy‑intensive industries, and regions built on coal, oil, or gas have a lot to lose from hard caps, and they’re extremely well organised.⁵⁷

Political economy research finds that “concentrated losers”—carbon‑intensive firms with big sunk investments—lobby hard, sue, and threaten job losses to weaken or block carbon pricing and strict regulation.⁵⁸
Fossil fuel companies have spent decades funding denial, delay, and scare campaigns arguing that climate policy will wreck the economy, delaying or watering down action in the EU, US, and elsewhere.⁵⁹
The people who benefit from strong climate policy—future generations, workers in new industries, people spared from extreme heat—are diffuse and poorly organised.⁵⁴

3. The free‑rider and “competitiveness” problem

Finally, climate change is a classic free‑rider problem. If Country A imposes strict reductions on its industries while Country B doesn’t, firms in A will complain about “losing competitiveness” and threaten to move.⁶⁰

The climate benefits of A’s ambition are global and shared; the economic costs are local and concentrated.⁶¹
That creates a strong temptation to wait for “others” to move first—and to rely on offsets or imported credits instead of hard domestic cuts.⁶²

This is the political backdrop against which carbon markets were sold. Cap‑and‑trade and offsetting were pitched as ways to make climate action more “flexible,” cheaper for businesses, and less politically suicidal for governments: don’t force everyone to cut by the same amount; let them trade responsibilities around, and let rich countries buy reductions wherever they’re cheapest.

Carbon markets were built on an elegant economic insight: if pollution has a price, markets can help reduce it at lowest cost. But elegance in theory does not survive contact with weak governance, asymmetric power, and human incentives. The only way to make the carbon market truly into a market of real climate action is to make verification and third party audits mandatory, including regulations around mandatory domestic reductions in wealthy credit-buying nations first, strict limits on offsets, removal-only credits, short credit lifetimes, and public registries with no double counting.

The next phase of the carbon market will be determined by whether we can build systems rigorous and honest enough to prevent a collision with human nature.

Sources

Let’s Make Cricket Better: Holistic Worker Safety in Cricket

No one should have to crowdfund a knee or a parent’s cancer treatment after giving their youth to our sport.

Yet that is exactly what keeps happening. A star fast bowler like Shaheen Shah Afridi ends up paying out of his own pocket for rehab in London, including tickets, hotels and medical consultations.¹ Former players quietly ask friends or sponsors to help fund chemotherapy or a hip replacement. Domestic journeymen who spent fifteen years in first‑class dressing rooms slip into anonymous financial stress as soon as the phone stops ringing.

We rely too much on family, love for cricket and personal sacrifice to cover gaps that should be designed out of the system.

If cricket can centralise broadcast rights, it can centralise worker protection.

Radical? Not radical enough. Cricket revenue is generated by cricket workers and they deserve to have a part of it, because currently cricket is a multi-billion-dollar industry that systematically externalises risk onto the very workers who generate its revenue.

The pillars of cricket-worker safety
When we talk about “safety”, we usually mean helmets, neck guards, concussion protocols, maybe mental health if we are being progressive. But for cricket workers—players, coaches, umpires, grounds staff, analysts, scorers, media and gig workers—safety is bigger.

A realistic model has five pillars:

Physical safety
The ability to work without unreasonable risk of injury or illness, and to get proper treatment and rehab when things go wrong.
Psychological and mental‑health safety
The ability to live and work without chronic fear, humiliation, harassment or untreated mental illness, with real paths to help.
Financial and life‑course safety
The ability to support yourself and your family while you work and after you stop, through fair wages, insurance and lifelong, inflation‑linked income.
Education and second‑career support
The chance to build skills and qualifications so your life does not end the day your cricket career does—or the day your body says “no more”.
Rights, voice and governance
The right to say “no” to unsafe conditions without career suicide, and to be represented in how the game is run.

These pillars feed into one another. You cannot train or travel properly if you are caring for an ailing parent without health insurance. You cannot reach your ceiling if one poor season would push your family back into poverty. You can be incandescently talented—like Mario Ančić in tennis—and still be forced to retire early when your health will not co‑operate.

So, borrowing from the time I worked in an architecture company:

These pillars are not separate projects; they are load‑bearing walls for the same building.
Overdesigning is key to safety.

Physical safety
I’ve written previously about head and neck injuries in cricket: the short version is that traumatic head and neck events in elite cricket are not freak accidents; over twelve seasons of Australian data, they occurred at a rate of around 7.3 per 100 players per season. Post‑2016 helmet regulations helped but did not eliminate risk.²

A safety-first industry looks very different.

Smarter workloads and safer training: Workload research in elite cricket shows that sudden spikes in balls bowled, high‑intensity fielding efforts or match minutes are what really drive injury risk. Prevention looks like:

Treating nets like matches for safety: helmets and neck guards against pace, structured fielding drills to avoid collisions, safety gear for high‑risk catching work.
Tracking overs, high‑intensity sessions and travel across all teams: club, state, franchise, national.
Age‑specific limits for fast bowlers and wicketkeepers, especially around adolescent growth spurts.

Rehab and medical care: A cricket worker’s access to quality medical care should not depend on their agent, their family’s savings, or whether their board happens to be solvent. When Shahid Afridi felt compelled to publicly reveal that Shaheen was paying for his own knee rehab abroad,³ that was less a scandal about one board and more a symptom of a structural gap.

Contracts and league rules should guarantee team‑funded medical treatment and rehab for sport‑related injuries, including overseas opinions where needed.
A central welfare scheme (more on this later) can step in when boards fail or workers fall outside central contracts.

Equipment Safety: Players playing with substandard equipment simply because they cannot afford better should not be tolerated. We need a central fund that can help provide basic cricket shoes, soft leathers, and other protective gear.

Family health: Catastrophic illness in a family is one of the biggest drivers of bankruptcy and debt in lower‑ and middle‑income countries.

A truly safe cricket industry therefore:

Provides comprehensive health insurance that covers immediate family for all contracted cricket workers, not just a player’s own injuries.
Makes coverage portable so it follows the worker across domestic, franchise and national gigs, with each employer contributing to premiums.

No one should be forced to choose between missing a season to care for family and risking that person’s life to stay on tour.

Psychological safety
Cricket has begun to talk about mental health, but mostly in terms of distress and crisis. While research shows elevated rates of anxiety, depression and harmful alcohol use among professional cricketers,⁴ ⁵ ⁶ linked to injury, selection insecurity, travel and workload, psychological safety is not only “not being suicidal”. It is also having the bandwidth to explore the edges of your ability.

Clinical pathways: Evidence‑informed recommendations for cricket include:

Specific programmes for vulnerable groups: injured players, fringe or under‑paid domestic players, women’s and associate cricketers.
Routine screening, using tools like the IOC’s Sport Mental Health Assessment Tool 1 (SMHAT‑1) or cricketer‑specific questionnaires, especially at high‑risk moments: injury, selection shocks, retirement, long tours.
Clear, confidential treatment pathways that connect players to independent psychologists and psychiatrists, not only team staff who are embedded in selection politics.

A central anonymous support platform: One practical step is a central Cricket Workers Support Line:

Sessions are paid fully or substantially by cricket money, not by the individual, with hard firewalls separating clinical information from selection and employment decisions.
An ICC‑ or multi‑board‑funded online and phone platform where any registered cricket worker can, anonymously, access mental‑health support.
Verification happens once via the worker’s ID; after that, the system lets them schedule therapy sessions and crisis calls without routing through their team management.

Potential: True psychological safety enables performance. Athletes reach higher ceilings when failure is not existential. Our sport should allow those who bring it to us the freedom to experiment, to adjust technique, to rest after injury, to risk competition for spots, knowing that your life does not implode after one bad season.

A player burdened by debt and family illness cannot afford to fail; every low score may feel existential.
A young cricketer from a very poor background may feel compelled to play through chronic pain to secure a contract.

Financial and life‑course safety
Sporting careers are short, post‑sport lives are long, and without structured pensions and transition planning, many ex‑athletes end up struggling financially. Even in the IPL era, Robin Uthappa’s conversations with Jarrod Kimber carry an undercurrent of unease: a player can go from crores on the auction graphic to feeling financially exposed and professionally lost within a few years of retirement, especially if income was uneven or badly managed. And he’s spoken about this on other platforms too.⁷

Lifelong, inflation‑linked income: Borrowing from pensions and social‑protection models:

Set up a Cricket Workers Pension that pays a modest but meaningful monthly income indexed to local inflation + 1–2% (to protect against slow erosion).
Define eligibility in tiers that respect service, not just fame:
- international players after a minimum number of caps or years;
- long‑serving domestic cricketers after, say, 10–15 seasons;
- umpires, scorers, grounds staff, analysts and physios with similar service thresholds.

This could build on or sit alongside existing national schemes like India’s pension and welfare funds for meritorious sportspersons, which already provide monthly pensions and medical assistance but often need better indexing and broader coverage.

Just because someone never played for the national team does not mean their contribution mattered less. The Ranji seamer who bowled 15 years of hard overs has also given his spine to cricket.

Family‑centred financial security: Financial safety is not just pensions:

Comprehensive health insurance for workers’ families, described earlier, is a central anti‑poverty measure.
Income protection insurance—paying a percentage of salary if a worker is sidelined long‑term by injury or illness—prevents acute crises.
Emergency hardship grants from a central welfare fund can catch those who fall through cracks, especially in countries with weak state safety nets.

The key idea: the system should be designed so that a torn ACL or a parent’s chemotherapy does not push a cricket family into debt traps.

Education, financial literacy and hand‑holding into second careers
The reality is that most cricket workers do not have the time, money or guidance to build a back up.

Education: The moment someone first earns from cricket—stipend, match fee, league contract—they should be brought into a deliberate education pipeline:

Scheme literacy: clear explanation of available pensions, welfare funds, health insurance, education grants and mental‑health services.
Financial literacy: sessions on taxes, basic budgeting, compound interest, long‑term investing, debt, and how to evaluate financial products.

Athlete‑finance work shows that early, simple education significantly reduces the risk of “sudden wealth” problems and post‑retirement financial distress.

Dual‑career and exit ramps: The goal is not to push everyone into higher education, but to normalise dual careers and structured transitions.

Cricket and other sports already offer good examples:

Saurabh Netravalkar⁸ ⁹ – India U‑19 quick who studied computer science, moved to the USA, and now combines a software‑engineering job with playing for USA cricket.
Mario Ančić¹⁰ – top‑10 tennis player whose career was cut short by illness; he later earned a law degree and built a successful career in law and investment banking.
Varun Chakravarthy¹¹ ¹² – qualified architect who worked in that profession before breaking through as an IPL spinner.
Harsha Bhogle¹³ ¹⁴ – chemical engineer and IIM graduate who moved into cricket commentary and media.
Joy Bhattacharjya¹⁵ – engineer who became a key figure in sports broadcasting, IPL team management and grassroots programmes.

A supportive system would:

Offer education grants or low‑interest loans for degrees, vocational training or professional exams, funded by cricket welfare money.
Tie up with universities and online providers for flexible programmes timed around off‑seasons.
Run career‑transition services via player associations: counselling, CV help, networking, introductions, even incubators for cricket workers wanting to start businesses.

Policy should assume that every cricket career will end earlier than planned.

Governance
None of this is possible if workers have no voice and all the money is trapped at the top.

Player and worker associations: Countries with strong player associations, like the PCA in England and Wales, show what is possible: collective bargaining, mental‑health programmes, education initiatives, hardship funds.

At a global level, projects on athletes’ social protection argue that unions and social dialogue are essential for securing pensions, healthcare and fair contracts.

Cricket needs:

Stronger, more inclusive associations that represent women, domestic players, associate‑nation workers and, where possible, non‑playing staff.
Collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) that bake in minimum wages, welfare contributions, insurance and safety standards.

Shift ICC money from Boards to workers: Earmark a small, rule-based share of ICC revenues for worker protection before other allocations. The financial backdrop is stark:

ICC annual income in the 2024–27 cycle is estimated at roughly US$600 million per year, mostly from media rights.¹⁶
Under the new distribution model, BCCI alone is projected to receive about 38.5% of ICC’s net earnings (yes I know we generate most of the money, but like Pakistan demonstrated successfully- we do that because others also play us. An IPL is a money spinning machine, but we don’t know how long it will last without international fixtures)—around US$230 million per year—while 90‑plus Associates share only around US$67.5 million per year.¹⁷

This is a multi‑billion‑dollar ecosystem.

The Cricket Workers’ Welfare Fund
I propose a Cricket Workers Welfare Fund:

Funded by AT LEAST:
- 5% of ICC central revenues;
- 5% of the distributions full members receive;
- 5% of domestic broadcast deals from major boards.

Even at conservative estimates, a 5% allocation across ICC revenues and major broadcast deals would create an annual fund in the tens of millions of dollars. That is sufficient to finance pensions, insurance subsidies, mental-health services and education grants at scale without destabilising existing board finances.

Crucially, the fund should have direct payment capacity:

A central registry of verified cricket workers, maintained with board input but audited independently. This requires administrative capacity — which the ICC already possesses in managing revenue distribution and event logistics.
An escrow‑like system where pensions, education grants, family‑health subsidies and hardship payments go straight to workers’ accounts or mobile wallets, not just via national boards.

This does not replace domestic responsibility, but it reduces the distance between ICC cheques and the people whose labour generates ICC’s broadcast appeal.

Unequal welfare states and deep poverty: One uncomfortable truth needs to be said clearly:

Cricket workers in England, Australia, New Zealand or Scotland live under stronger welfare states (public healthcare, unemployment benefits, pensions) than workers in India, Pakistan, Zimbabwe, Namibia.¹⁸
Many current and recent stars come from abject poverty, from families living on daily wages, informal housing and unstable work.

A fair system would therefore:

Weight welfare‑fund support more towards workers in countries with weaker social‑security systems.
Require boards to pass a defined share of their welfare allocations to grassroots workers—district coaches, grounds staff, scorers, women’s domestic players—not only centrally contracted men’s internationals.

More money in grassroots does not just increase dignity; it widens the talent funnel. Talented kids whose families live on the edge can stay in the game because cricket, not their parents, carries the risk.

A global sport cannot rely on personal sacrifice as its social-security model. The ICC has successfully centralised commercial rights to grow the global game. The next stage of governance maturity is to centralise baseline worker protection. Cricket has the revenue, the data and the administrative capacity. What remains is the decision to redesign the system.

Annexures: worked financial model
Here’s a worked example for the above 5% proposal (beware, mathematics ahead).

Estimated Annual ICC Revenue

Item	Estimated Annual Figure (USD)	Notes
Total ICC central revenues	$600M	ICC 2024–27 rights cycle¹⁶ ¹⁷

Pillar 1 — 5% Levy on ICC Central Revenues (Pre-Distribution)

Levy Base	Rate	Annual Fund Contribution
ICC central revenues ($600M)	5%	$30M

Applied before any distribution to members.

Pillar 2 — 5% of Total Board Distributions

Step	Figure
ICC central revenues	$600M
Share distributed to Full and Associate Members (assume 80%)	$480M
Welfare levy (5% of distributed amount)	$24M

The 80% distribution assumption is illustrative. The actual levy applies to whatever the ICC’s verified distribution percentage is in a given cycle — this table updates automatically if that figure changes. Individual board contributions are not tracked separately; the levy is applied at the point of ICC disbursement, before funds reach boards. This matters: no single board can be singled out for a particular dollar figure, and no board can quietly underpay.

Pillar 3 — 5% of Domestic Broadcast Deals (Major Boards)

Unlike Pillars 1 and 2, domestic rights are not centrally reported, so estimation is unavoidable here. Two scenarios are shown to account for what I imagine might become the most contested variable: the IPL.

Scenario	Domestic Rights Pool (USD)	5% Contribution
Including IPL (Star/JioStar + Viacom18 blended, 2023–27)	~$1,735M	~$86.75M
Excluding IPL	~$495M	~$24.75M

Whether IPL revenues should be included in the levy base is a legitimate policy question. The BCCI is likely to argue that the IPL is a franchise tournament rather than an international cricket revenue stream, and therefore outside scope. As can be seen, even if the IPL is excluded, the fund remains large enough to be meaningful, as the totals below show.

Total Annual Fund — Two Scenarios

Funding Pillar	With IPL Included	Without IPL
ICC central revenues (5%, pre-distribution)	$30.0M	$30.0M
Board distributions (5% of 80% of $600M)	$24.0M	$24.0M
Domestic broadcast (5%)	$86.75M	$24.75M
Total Annual Fund	~$141M	~$79M

The conservative scenario — excluding the IPL entirely — yields approximately $79 million per year. For context, that is more than the total annual allocation currently received by all 90-plus Associate members combined.

ILLUSTRATIVE Fund Allocation

Proportions below are illustrative. An independent governance body should determine final allocations based on a formal needs assessment. Support is weighted toward workers in countries with weaker state social-security systems.

Programme	Illustrative Annual Allocation (USD)	Rationale
Pensions (domestic and international workers)	$25–30M	Indexed monthly payments; the highest-priority obligation
Family health insurance subsidies	$15–20M	Portable coverage across formats and employers; weighted toward low-income cricket economies
Mental health services	$5–8M	Anonymous support platform plus embedded clinical programmes
Education grants and career transition	$8–12M	Scholarships, vocational training, dual-career support
Emergency hardship grants	$5–7M	Fast-disbursement fund for workers in acute crisis
Equipment access fund	$3–5M	Protective gear for underfunded domestic environments
Fund administration and independent audit	$3–5M	Not routed through boards
Total	$64–87M	Matches the conservative (ex-IPL) scenario

A Brief Note on the Pension Numbers
$25–30M sounds large in the abstract. It is easier to evaluate with a concrete model.

Assume 5,000 eligible workers (there may be more or less, this is just an assumption) — a combined pool of long-serving domestic players, umpires, coaches, grounds staff and scorers across Full Member countries. A pension of $400 per month (inflation-indexed, and already significant purchasing power in most cricket-playing economies outside England and Australia) costs $24M per year. What matters most is how eligibility is defined — specifically, ensuring that service thresholds capture the domestic journeyman who gave fifteen years to first-class cricket, not only the player who earned fifty caps.

A Note on Long-Term Self-Sufficiency
The allocation is deliberately conservative. In years where the fund’s income exceeds its disbursements the surplus should not sit idle or be returned to boards. It should be invested, in low-cost, diversified index funds that track global equity markets.

The logic: a fund receiving $79M annually but disbursing $70M in its first years carries a $9M annual surplus. Invested at a long-run real return of, say, 5–6% per year (broadly consistent with global equity index performance over multi-decade horizons, or get a fund manager), a corpus begins to build. Over ten to fifteen years, the investment income from that corpus starts to contribute meaningfully to annual disbursements. Over a longer horizon, it is entirely conceivable that the fund becomes substantially self-financing — reducing, and eventually eliminating, its dependence on annual levies from the ICC and boards.

This is not a novel idea. Sovereign wealth funds, university endowments, and large pension schemes all operate on exactly this principle. There is no reason cricket’s welfare fund cannot do the same. The difference is between permanent dependency on cricket’s administrators and genuine financial independence. The workers who build this game deserve the latter.

A Note on the Escrow Principle
Escrow is a legal and financial arrangement where a neutral third party holds funds, property, or documents on behalf of two transacting parties until specific conditions are met. It acts as a safety mechanism, ensuring that payments are only released after obligations are met.¹⁹

The fund is not useful if it is simply an additional line item in board budgets. The central registry and direct-payment mechanism proposed in the main text is what separates a welfare fund that exists on paper from one that actually reaches a groundskeeper in Harare or a domestic spinner in Sylhet. Administration costs — approximately 4–6% of fund value — are built into the allocation above. That cost is not a reason to avoid the system. It is the price of accountability.

Final note: I do not expect this proposal to change a single vote at the International Cricket Council. Administrators will protect institutional power, as they always have. This is not written in the expectation of immediate reform. It is written as a marker in time. So that if, one day, someone searches for a serious model of cricket-worker protection, a structured proposal already exists. Worker welfare is not “too expensive.” It is a design choice. I don’t expect this to move the needle forward, but perhaps it can help ensure it does not move backward.

Sources

E waste – II: India

India is the world’s third-largest generator of e-waste, after China and the United States.¹ In 2019-20, India generated 1.01 million metric tonnes (MT) of e-waste.² By 2023-24, that figure had jumped to 1.751 million MT—a staggering 73% increase in just five years.³

To put this in context: we’re generating e-waste at a rate that’s nearly doubled in less than half a decade. 65 Indian cities generate more than 60% of India’s total e-waste.⁴ Ten states account for 70% of the national total.⁴ States like Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Telangana, and Uttarakhand have each collected and processed over 400,000 tonnes between 2016-17 and 2023-24.⁵

In 2019-20, India recycled just 22% of its e-waste.³ By 2023-24, that figure had climbed to 43%.³ Formal collection capacity expanded significantly over this period — though these figures are contested, given documented issues with EPR certificate fraud.⁵ However, 57% of e-waste (equivalent to 990,000 MT) still goes untreated every year.³ CSE’s Siddharth Ghanshyam Singh has said, “The recycling rate for e-waste remains low due to the authorities’ inability to effectively engage the various stakeholders involved.”³

Over 90% of e-waste in India is handled by the informal sector—untrained workers in urban slums who use rudimentary, dangerous processes without protective equipment.⁶ These processes include:⁷

Open burning of cables to recover copper, releasing toxic fumes
Acid baths to extract precious metals, contaminating water and soil
Manual dismantling without safety gear, exposing workers to heavy metals
Heating circuit boards over open flames to melt solder

The workers—often including children—are directly exposed to lead, mercury, cadmium, brominated flame retardants, and other toxins.⁸ The health consequences are severe: respiratory problems, neurological damage, kidney damage, developmental issues in children, and various cancers.⁸ Pollutants leach into surrounding communities’ air, water, soil, and food.⁷ Studies show that e-waste workers experience far greater health impacts than nearby residents, but even bystanders suffer from the pollution.⁸

Yet this informal sector persists because there’s money in it.⁶ Scrap dealers offer cash for old electronics; formal collection infrastructure is limited; and public awareness of proper disposal methods is low.⁹ A 2022 study of consumers in semi-urban Tamil Nadu found that while 76% scored well on a general six-question e-waste awareness composite, only 40.5% were even familiar with the term ‘e-waste’ itself — and 79.4% were entirely unaware of the e-waste legislation and rules in India. The gap between general awareness and specific, actionable knowledge has real consequences.⁹

How do people actually dispose of e-waste? The study revealed:⁹

35% give their e-waste to scrap dealers (who often operate in the informal sector)
21% dispose of it with regular household waste
Smaller percentages engage in proper recycling or collection programs

Anecdotally, I have noticed a fourth behaviour, which is to store old devices at home for lack of a better option to dispose of them properly. I do use my old phone as an alarm clock these days. My mother uses hers as a reading device.

The reasons for this behavior are clear: lack of convenient collection points, insufficient awareness of formal systems, and the absence of economic incentives.¹¹ When people do dispose of electronics, they often choose the path of least resistance—the scrap dealer who comes to the door, or the trash bin.⁹

EPR
If e-waste is valuable, dangerous, and growing, the obvious question is why it’s still handled so poorly. The short answer is incentives.¹⁰ The long answer is that we’ve built systems that reward disposal, speed, and convenience—while making responsible recycling slow, confusing, or invisible.¹⁰

EPR is one of the most interesting environmental policies I’ve worked around, and is based on a simple principle: entities that place products on the market are made responsible for managing those products at end of life.¹¹ Electronics are considered well suited to EPR because producers are identifiable, products are traceable, and end-of-life impacts are significant.¹¹

Electronics contain hazardous materials that impose real public health and environmental costs when improperly handled.⁷ ⁸ At the same time, they contain valuable recoverable materials.¹¹ Without regulation, neither cost nor value is fully reflected in product pricing or business decisions. EPR attempts to internalise these externalities by shifting responsibility upstream—from municipalities and informal workers to producers.¹¹

In theory, a well‑designed EPR system for e‑waste should deliver several linked outcomes:¹²

Reduce unsafe disposal: By making producers responsible for collection and treatment, the policy aims to move waste out of dumps, open burning and backyard acid leaching, and into controlled facilities that meet environmental and occupational standards.
Increase recycling rates: Targets and obligations should push more material into authorised collection and recycling channels, improving national recycling performance relative to the global average.
Encourage better product design: When end‑of‑life costs show up on producers’ balance sheets, they have reasons to reduce hazardous substances, design for disassembly, and extend product lifetimes through durability and reparability.¹¹
Create stable financing: EPR fees, take‑back schemes, and producer responsibility organisations are meant to provide predictable funding for collection, transportation, recycling, and public awareness, instead of leaving municipalities and informal workers to absorb the costs.

On paper, this makes sense. In practice, it’s messy.

In India, producers meet EPR obligations largely through recycling certificates—essentially buying proof that someone, somewhere, recycled an equivalent amount of e-waste.¹³ This has improved formal recycling capacity, but it hasn’t meaningfully displaced the informal sector.¹⁴ Why? Because informal recyclers are faster, cheaper, and embedded in neighborhoods.⁶ They pay cash at the doorstep. Formal systems require awareness, transport, and effort.⁶

(You can also read about the economics of remanufacturing here)

India’s E-Waste Management Rules 2022 cover 106 different electrical and electronic equipment (EEE) products and their components. The 2022 rules recognise the following categories of stakeholders:¹⁵

Producers/Manufacturers: companies that make electronics for sale in India
Importers: those who bring electronics into India for sale
Bulk consumers: public institutions, offices, companies that generate large volumes of e-waste
Collection centers: authorized facilities for gathering e-waste from consumers
Recyclers: certified facilities that process e-waste using environmentally sound methods
Refurbishers: operations that repair and restore used electronics for resale

All these entities must register on a central portal developed by the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB). Operating without registration is illegal.

Working smarter, not harder¹⁶
Kabadiwalas already operate the country’s most efficient reverse-logistics network. They have neighborhood-level reach, established trust, real-time pricing, and cash-based incentives that formal systems lack. Instead of trying to replace this network, policy should aim to formalize, standardize, and economically align it with safe recycling outcomes.

The core idea is simple: kabadiwalas should be treated as licensed collection and aggregation agents within the EPR framework. Producers would be mandated to route a fixed share of their collection targets through registered informal collectors. In return, kabadiwalas receive predictable payments for verified collection volumes—separate from the resale value of scrap—creating a financial incentive to hand material over to authorised recyclers rather than processing it themselves.

Today, informal workers earn more by dismantling, burning, or chemically processing electronics than by merely collecting them. Any incentive system that ignores this reality will fail. The solution is to decouple income from hazardous processing by paying for collection and safe transfer, not extraction.

This can be achieved through a per-kilogram collection fee, funded by EPR levies, paid directly to registered kabadiwalas once material is delivered to certified aggregation centers. Higher fees can be offered for high-risk items like lithium-ion batteries, CRTs, and circuit boards. Over time, this shifts the profit center upstream—from toxic backyard processing to safe logistics—without destroying livelihoods.

Importantly, traceability should flow forward, not backward. Once e-waste enters a certified channel, downstream recyclers and producers carry responsibility for compliance. Kabadiwalas should not be punished for system failures beyond their control; they should be paid for verified inputs.

Also: incentives alone are not enough. Mandates must close the loopholes that currently allow producers to meet EPR obligations on paper while real waste leaks into informal streams.

Regulations should require that:

A minimum percentage of e-waste collection occurs via registered decentralized collectors
Producers demonstrate geographic coverage, not just aggregate tonnage
Producers fund training, safety gear, and transition support for informal collectors they rely on

This forces formal systems to go where the waste actually is: homes, offices, and small businesses—not just bulk institutional sources.

This approach aligns incentives across the system:

Kabadiwalas earn stable, safer income
Producers meet real, verifiable EPR targets
Formal recyclers get cleaner, higher-quality feedstock
Cities and regulators reduce environmental and health damage without heavy enforcement

Most importantly, it acknowledges a basic truth: India does not lack recycling capacity—it lacks institutional pathways that convert existing economic behavior into safe outcomes. India’s e-waste crisis is not a failure of technology. It is a failure of incentives. Until policy rewards safe behavior as effectively as the informal market rewards unsafe extraction, the system will continue to leak toxicity.

The best part? Formal-informal partnership pilots in Delhi, Bangalore, and Pune, documented by GIZ in 2017, established that integration is operationally feasible. The document also reveals why this setup keeps failing: without mandatory EPR-linked financial flows from producers, these partnerships depend on goodwill and donor funding, and collapse once the initial support ends. The lesson isn’t that the model doesn’t work. It’s that it can’t be left to voluntary agreements.¹⁶

I worked on an e-waste project in 2013, and then on another one around 2018. The conversations hadn’t changed. The problems hadn’t changed. Even the language hadn’t changed. Everyone knew what wasn’t working — but the problems persisted. Incorporating the informal sector into the formal setup is one of the most inclusive and forward-looking steps the government can take, and it’s beyond time this was taken care of.

Sources

SEBI BRSR Explainer

The Business Responsibility and Sustainability Reporting (BRSR) is India’s most significant regulatory intervention in the domain of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) disclosures. Introduced by the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) as the successor to the Business Responsibility Report (BRR), the BRSR mandates that the top 1,000 listed companies by market capitalisation submit structured, principle-based ESG disclosures as part of their annual reports. The framework is anchored in the National Guidelines on Responsible Business Conduct (NGRBC), issued by the Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA) in 2019. The NGRBC itself replaced the earlier National Voluntary Guidelines (NVGs) of 2011.

Before we go ahead, here’s a brief map:

BRSR: This is the framework.
BRSR Core: This is a subset of the framework
Industry Standards: This is an interpretation guide.
Assurance/Assessment: How the reports are verified.
Value Chain Disclosures: The expansion.

History¹
India’s journey toward structured sustainability reporting began formally with the Business Responsibility Report (BRR), introduced under Regulation 34(2)(f) of the SEBI LODR Regulations, 2015. Initially applicable to the top 100 listed companies by market capitalisation from FY2013–14, the BRR was an attempt to institutionalise non-financial disclosures within the mainstream corporate reporting ecosystem.

However, the BRR had structural limitations that became increasingly apparent as the global ESG discourse matured:

The reporting format was largely narrative and open-ended, allowing considerable interpretive latitude that undermined comparability
There were no standardized quantitative metrics, making cross-company and cross-sector benchmarking virtually impossible
The framework had no third-party assurance requirements, leaving disclosures entirely self-declared and unverified
Coverage was limited to just 100 companies, leaving the vast majority of the Indian listed market outside the reporting ambit
The framework did not adequately reflect global developments such as the Paris Agreement, the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), or the rise of formal ESG investing frameworks

In May 2021, SEBI issued a notification amending the LODR Regulations, formally announcing the discontinuation of the BRR and its replacement with the Business Responsibility and Sustainability Reporting (BRSR) framework. The transition was planned in a phased manner to allow companies adequate time to build institutional capacity:

FY2021–22: Voluntary phase — the top 1,000 listed companies were encouraged, but not required, to adopt BRSR
FY2022–23 onwards: Mandatory phase — BRSR became a compulsory annual disclosure obligation for the same cohort

Who Must File?² ³
Under the amended LODR Regulations, the top 1,000 listed entities by market capitalisation are required to submit BRSR annually, starting from FY2022–23. The list of applicable companies is determined based on market capitalisation as of March 31 of the preceding financial year, introducing a dynamic element — companies moving in and out of the top 1,000 threshold will correspondingly enter or exit the mandatory disclosure obligation.

For FY2025–26, SEBI has reiterated that the top 1,000 listed entities by market capitalization remain obligated to file BRSR, with top 500 listed entities specifically required to obtain assessment or assurance of BRSR Core disclosures.

Unlisted companies are not currently required to file BRSR, regardless of size, unless they are captured within the consolidated reporting boundary of a listed parent
Subsidiaries of listed companies may be included within the reporting boundary if the parent opts for consolidated reporting
SME-listed entities are currently excluded, though SEBI has indicated potential future expansion
Foreign subsidiaries of Indian listed companies may be included or excluded based on the parent’s chosen reporting boundary

Filing Mechanisms⁴ ⁵
The BRSR must be filed as part of the annual report submitted to stock exchanges — typically by June 30, within three months of the financial year-end. Filing must be done in XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) format on the exchange portals (NSE/BSE NEAPS platforms), along with a PDF version for public viewing.

Structure⁶ ⁷ ⁸
The BRSR framework is organised into three sections:

Section A: General Disclosures
Section A establishes the organisational context within which all subsequent disclosures must be read. It functions as the foundational layer. Key disclosures include:

Company details: Name, Corporate Identification Number (CIN), registered office address, website, stock exchange listings, and the contact details of the BRSR designated officer — a requirement that enhances accountability by attaching a human name to the disclosure
Reporting boundary: Whether the report is prepared on a standalone or consolidated basis, and a clear explanation of what is included or excluded from scope
Business activities: Products and services contributing to 90% of the company’s turnover, along with individual percentage contributions — providing investors a clear map of what the company actually does
Markets served: Domestic and international presence, including export revenue as a percentage of total revenue
Employee and worker data: Total headcount broken down by permanent/temporary/contractual categories, gender diversity at the board and Key Management Personnel (KMP) level, and employee turnover trends across three financial years — providing a longitudinal view of workforce dynamics
CSR activities: A summary of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives and spending, though specific expenditure percentages are no longer separately required under BRSR, as they are captured in the Companies Act disclosures
Complaints and grievances: Any received on matters of responsible business conduct, including status of resolution

Section B: Management and Process Disclosures
This is the governance layer. Disclosures include:

Board oversight of ESG: Whether the board has a dedicated committee for sustainability, how frequently ESG topics appear on the board agenda, and whether a director has been designated as the responsible signatory for BRSR
Policies and frameworks: The existence, scope, and public availability of policies on human rights, labor standards, environmental protection, anti-corruption, data privacy, and other relevant domains — including whether these policies extend to value chain partners
Risk management integration: Whether ESG risks are formally integrated into the company’s Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) framework — a critical indicator of institutional maturity, as companies that treat ESG as separate from mainstream risk management are typically further behind in their sustainability journey
Stakeholder engagement: Formal mechanisms for identifying, mapping, and engaging with material stakeholders — employees, communities, suppliers, customers, investors, regulators, and civil society — including frequency and outcomes of engagement
Training and awareness programs: Details of training conducted on responsible business conduct across employee and worker categories
Grievance redressal mechanisms: Internal and external channels available to stakeholders to report concerns, and the effectiveness of these mechanisms

Section C: Principle-wise Performance Disclosures
Structured around the nine principles of NGRBC, it comprises both qualitative narratives and quantitative data points expressed in standardised units (kWh, tonnes of CO₂e, kiloliters, etc.). Each principle contains Essential Indicators (mandatory, 98) and Leadership Indicators (voluntary, 42). The tiered structure is strategically important for sectors with vastly different ESG profiles. A coal mining company and a software services firm face fundamentally different materiality landscapes; the essential indicators ensure a universal baseline while leadership indicators allow sector-specific differentiation.

The nine principles of the National Guidelines on Responsible Business Conduct (NGRBC)⁹ ¹⁰
Table:

#	Full NGRBC Statement
P1	Businesses should conduct and govern themselves with integrity, and in a manner that is ethical, transparent, and accountable
P2	Businesses should provide goods and services in a manner that is sustainable and safe
P3	Businesses should respect and promote the well-being of all employees, including those in their value chains
P4	Businesses should respect the interests of and be responsive to all their stakeholders
P5	Businesses should respect and promote human rights
P6	Businesses should respect and make efforts to protect and restore the environment
P7	Businesses, when engaging in influencing public and regulatory policy, should do so in a manner that is responsible and transparent
P8	Businesses should promote inclusive growth and equitable development
P9	Businesses should engage with and provide value to their consumers in a responsible manner

No principle can be reported on in isolation — SEBI and MCA both emphasize that they are interdependent, interrelated, and must be addressed holistically across a company’s operations and value chain.
Environmental disclosures are concentrated almost entirely in P6. Social obligations are distributed across P3, P4, P5, P8, and P9. Governance is embedded in P1, P7, and cuts across all nine through the Section B process disclosures.
Essential Indicators constitute the mandatory minimum disclosure requirement. These indicators are designed to be measurable, standardized, and verifiable, reducing the scope for narrative manipulation or selective disclosure.
Leadership Indicators represent best-practice and advanced-stage sustainability performance. They allow genuine sustainability leaders to differentiate themselves meaningfully from laggards, and they function as a forward-looking indicator of regulatory direction.

While Section C establishes the full ESG performance architecture, SEBI later identified a narrower subset of metrics that investors consistently relied upon — this became BRSR Core.

BRSR Core¹¹ ¹²
In July 2023, SEBI introduced the BRSR Core which is a focused subset of the most material, investor-relevant, and comparable ESG indicators within the broader BRSR. The BRSR Core comprises nine Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) organized across three ESG domains:

Environmental KPIs:

GHG Footprint (Scope 1 and 2 emissions, with PPP-adjusted intensity ratios)
Water Footprint (consumption and intensity)
Energy Footprint (consumption and intensity)
Waste Management (generation, recycling, disposal ratios)

Social KPIs:

Employee Well-Being and Safety (health benefits, accident rates, training metrics)
Gender Diversity in Business (gender representation across levels, pay gap disclosures, POSH complaints)
Enabling Inclusive Development (MSME procurement percentages, local sourcing)

Governance KPIs:

Fairness in Engaging with Customers and Suppliers (cybersecurity incidents, data privacy compliance, supplier payment terms)
Open-ness of Business (corporate governance disclosures, financial transparency indicators)

New KPIs introduced through March 2025 amendments include: job creation in small towns, openness of business metrics, and gross wages paid to women — reflecting SEBI’s intent to deepen the social dimension of BRSR Core.

The BRSR Core is not being rolled out uniformly across all 1,000 companies simultaneously. SEBI has adopted a company-size-stratified phased approach:

Financial Year	BRSR Core Applicability
FY 2023–24	Top 150 listed entities by market cap
FY 2024–25	Top 250 listed entities
FY 2025–26	Top 500 listed entities
FY 2026–27	Top 1,000 listed entities

This graduated expansion gives smaller companies within the top 1,000 additional preparation time while ensuring that the largest, most systemically important companies are subject to the most rigorous standards first.

Value Chain ESG Disclosures⁵ ¹² ¹³
SEBI recognises that for many industries, Scope 3 emissions (those embedded in purchased goods, logistics, and sold products) can represent 70–90% of total carbon footprint; excluding the value chain from sustainability reporting would render BRSR’s environmental data structurally incomplete. However, to ease implementation timelines, SEBI significantly revised the value chain disclosure framework through its March 28, 2025 circular, because many small and mid-size suppliers in Indian value chains are not yet equipped for formal ESG data reporting.

The value chain definition now explicitly covers upstream and downstream partners that individually contribute at least 2% of the listed entity’s total purchases or sales by value — a more precise and operationally workable threshold than the earlier reference to “top 10 suppliers and customers”
Companies may limit aggregate disclosures to partners covering 75% of total purchases and sales, providing a practical ceiling that prevents the exercise from becoming an administrative marathon
The applicable timeline is:

Financial Year	Value Chain Disclosure Requirement
FY 2025–26	Voluntary ESG disclosures for top 250 entities; prior year data voluntary
FY 2026–27	Voluntary assessment or assurance on value chain ESG disclosures

The shift from a comply-or-explain to a voluntary approach for FY2025–26 reflects SEBI’s responsiveness to industry feedback about implementation readiness — many small and mid-size suppliers in Indian value chains are not yet equipped for formal ESG data reporting.

Assurance Requirements¹²
When BRSR Core was introduced in July 2023, SEBI mandated reasonable assurance on BRSR Core disclosures in a phased manner. Reasonable assurance — the highest standard of verification in auditing practice — was considered the gold standard for ESG credibility, but proved operationally challenging given the nascent state of sustainability auditing in India.

In response to an Expert Committee recommendation, SEBI made a significant policy adjustment: through the March 2025 circular, the term “assurance” was replaced with “assessment or assurance” for BRSR Core verification. It means listed entities can now choose between:

Formal Assurance: Conducted by chartered accountants or statutory auditors following established auditing standards, providing a high degree of confidence in data accuracy
Assessment: A broader, potentially profession-agnostic verification process developed per standards by the Industry Standards Forum (ISF) in consultation with SEBI — designed to reduce compliance costs and open the market to qualified non-auditor sustainability practitioners

SEBI has specified that assessors and assurers must meet independence requirements — they cannot be entities that sell products to or offer consulting services to the reporting company.

The scope of assessment or assurance covers:

Accuracy of data reported in BRSR Core KPIs
Completeness of disclosures — are all required data points present?
Consistency with source documents — does reported data align with underlying records?
Compliance with BRSR format — are prescribed units, taxonomies, and templates used correctly?

Industry Standards on BRSR Core²
The December 20, 2024 circular introduced the Industry Standards on Reporting of BRSR Core, developed by the Industry Standards Forum (ISF) — a joint initiative of ASSOCHAM, FICCI, and CII (India’s three premier industry bodies). These standards are not legally binding but are strongly recommended by SEBI and are expected to become the de facto interpretation guide for listed entities and their assurance providers.

Key Provisions:

PPP-Adjusted Intensity Ratios: Companies must report environmental intensity metrics (GHG, energy, water, waste) per unit of revenue, with revenue figures adjusted for Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) using the latest IMF-published conversion rate for India. The same PPP rate must be applied consistently to both the current and prior year comparatives — preventing companies from manipulating apparent year-over-year improvement by switching conversion rates. This PPP adjustment is intended to facilitate meaningful comparison between Indian companies and global peers on investor dashboards.
Output-Based Intensity for Manufacturing: For manufacturing entities, output-based intensity ratios (e.g., tonnes of CO₂e per tonne of production) are required alongside revenue-based metrics. Service entities use Full-Time Equivalents (FTEs) as their input measure. This dual approach acknowledges that revenue-based intensity can be distorted by price fluctuations — a company’s emissions profile doesn’t change just because commodity prices spiked.
Spend-Based Estimation: Where primary measurement data is unavailable for emissions, energy, or water consumption, companies may temporarily use a spend-based approach — estimating environmental footprints based on annual expenditure data and published emission/consumption factors. This provides an entry point for smaller or less-instrumented companies while setting expectations that primary measurement will be established over time.
Greenhouse Gas Emission Factors: For Scope 2 emissions from purchased electricity, companies must use the latest grid emission factor published by the Central Electricity Authority (CEA). Companies using renewable energy certificates (RECs) or power purchase agreements (PPAs) for green power must clearly specify the accounting methodology.
Attribute-wise Technical Clarifications: The standards provide detailed technical guidance on each of the nine BRSR Core attributes.
Global Framework Alignment: The Industry Standards explicitly reference GRI (Global Reporting Initiative), SASB (Sustainability Accounting Standards Board), and TCFD (Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures), establishing conceptual bridges between BRSR and the global sustainability reporting landscape. Companies that already report under these frameworks can leverage their existing infrastructure rather than building parallel reporting systems.

Common Reporting Errors¹³
In May 2024, SEBI’s Expert Committee issued a report identifying systemic quality failures in BRSR submissions. The most frequently identified problems included:

Incorrect units: Reporting energy consumption in megawatts (a measure of power capacity) instead of kilowatt-hours (a measure of energy consumed) — a fundamental error that renders the data meaningless
Mathematical inconsistencies: Reporting waste recovered as greater than total waste generated — an arithmetically impossible outcome that signals either poor data governance or deliberate inflation of recycling figures
Unexplained zero disclosures: Reporting zero renewable energy without explanation, particularly for large industrial companies where this is implausible
Headcount mismatches: Total employees reported differently across different sections of the same report — suggesting that data is being pulled from multiple, unreconciled sources
Training overreporting: Training hours provided to more workers than the company’s total worker strength — again, an arithmetically impossible outcome
Poor quality environmental data under Principle 6: Generic, unsubstantiated figures for energy and emissions that are clearly not grounded in actual metering or operational data

SEBI’s response to these failures was to require:

Internal verification protocols before submission, with the responsible director confirming accuracy
Consistent use of prescribed units throughout the report
Cross-referencing of BRSR data with corresponding data in audited financial statements and directors’ reports
Documented explanations for any “Not Applicable” responses — a blanket N/A without justification is no longer acceptable

Cross-Referencing with Global ESG Frameworks²
Companies that already produce GRI- or TCFD-aligned reports — typically multinationals or companies with significant international investor bases — can provide a mapping table (cross-walk) showing how their existing disclosures satisfy BRSR requirements. This avoids duplication of effort and leverages existing reporting infrastructure.

It’s also important because with the alphabet soup of sustainability reports plaguing ESG reporting, it’s the right step to not view BRSR as a competing or isolated framework but as part of a convergent global sustainability reporting architecture.

Final points:

BRSR is less about sustainability storytelling and more about data discipline.
And discipline, in capital markets, compounds.
BRSR positions India as one of the few emerging markets with regulator-mandated ESG reporting, ahead of many developed jurisdictions in structured ESG disclosures.

Sources

Why ESG Risk is Business Risk

In 2020, Rio Tinto legally blew up 46,000‑year‑old Aboriginal rock shelters at Juukan Gorge in Western Australia to expand an iron‑ore mine.¹ The caves contained evidence of continuous human occupation over tens of thousands of years and were sacred to the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura (PKKP) people.²

The blasting was technically lawful under existing approvals,³ but it triggered widespread outrage, a parliamentary inquiry,⁴ and the resignation of the CEO and two senior executives.⁵ Investors and ESG analysts had already flagged Rio Tinto as weak on community relations and governance factors capturing “risk of operational disruption due to community opposition”.⁶

It seems obvious that blasting someone’s spiritual sites to pieces would be considered harmful, so why wasn’t Rio able to see this before they did it?

The short answer is: their risk system did not treat those caves as a business risk. They thought it would be enough to simply get governmental approval rather than understanding the historical and cultural value of the caves. The environmental and social damage did not register as a real problem until after it detonated into a governance crisis.

Traditional finance textbooks worry about market and credit risk, the volatility of asset prices, and company‑specific risk that diversified investors can wash away. ESG risk simply asks a different set of questions about the same business:

How fragile is your position if one whistle‑blower email exposes years of “creative” emissions accounting?
What happens when your coal plant becomes uninsurable or unprofitable long before the end of its physical life?
What is your downside if a supplier’s factory fire kills workers and your brand name is on the label?

Those are not “extra” concerns. They are channels through which financial, legal, operational and reputational damage hits a company.

So,

E: “Climate change” becomes a three‑day flood that shuts your main warehouse, a mandatory carbon price that doubles operating costs, or the loss of export markets because you fail EU value‑chain rules.
S: “Labour conditions” becomes a factory fire, a strike during peak season, or a viral video of an abusive supervisor.
G: “Governance” becomes fraud in a subsidiary, a bribery case under anti‑corruption law, or your board signing off on misleading ESG claims and facing regulators later.

Case 1: Ali Enterprises
In 2012, a fire at the Ali Enterprises garment factory in Karachi killed more than 250 workers and injured many more, making it one of the deadliest factory fires in modern garment production and Pakistan’s worst industrial accident.⁷ The blaze reportedly followed an explosion, but what turned it into a mass‑casualty event were basic safety failures: locked exits, barred windows, no functioning fire alarm, inadequate equipment, and workers with no emergency training.⁷

Weeks before the fire, Italian auditor RINA had certified the factory as compliant with the SA8000 social responsibility standard, on behalf of German discount retailer KiK.⁸ The audit put a stamp of “safe” on what campaigners later called a death trap.

In ESG terms:

Social: labour rights and health and safety were not marginal; they determined whether hundreds of workers lived or died.
Governance: both the factory’s internal controls and the external certification regime failed. Social audits functioned more as reputational shields for brands than as real safety controls.

For brands sourcing from similar factories, the risk event is not “labour standards in xyz country”; it is “mass‑casualty factory disaster linked to our supply chain”, with consequences including legal claims, disrupted production, and global coverage featuring your logo.

Case 2: Rana Plaza
Months later, the Rana Plaza building collapse in Bangladesh killed more than 1,100 garment workers and injured thousands.⁹ Like Ali Enterprises, it exposed structural failings: illegal construction, ignored warning cracks, and workers pushed back into the building under threat of lost wages.⁹ ¹⁰

Together, Ali Enterprises and Rana Plaza turned factory safety from a “CSR” talking point into a core ESG risk for global fashion brands. They were now forced to answer the question: what is the probability and impact of catastrophic supplier accidents affecting our brand value?¹¹

In response:

More than 200 brands signed the legally binding Bangladesh Accord, committing to fund and enforce independent safety inspections and improvements in supplier factories.¹²
The Accord’s inspections and remediation programmes significantly reduced safety risks in covered factories, although broader labour standards and the situation in other countries still lagged.¹³

Again, this is ESG as business risk:

Social: worker safety and freedom to refuse unsafe work.
Governance: the difference between voluntary codes of conduct and binding, enforceable agreements with unions and NGOs.

Case 3: Prologis¹⁴
Prologis, a global logistics real estate company, analysed energy consumption across its portfolio, identified inefficiencies, invested in energy‑efficient technologies and renewables, and built this into its tenant proposition. The results included:

Lower energy costs across the portfolio.
A reduced carbon footprint.
Stronger positioning with ESG‑conscious tenants looking for efficient, low‑carbon facilities.

Here:

Environmental risk is transition risk: rising carbon prices, stricter building codes, and tenant demand for green buildings that could otherwise turn older assets into stranded ones.
Social shows up in tenant relationships and expectations.

Prologis treated these as business hazards, not future CSR talking points. It used ESG data to find where margins would quietly erode over time and acted early.

And what about Rio Tinto and the sacred caves? Through an ESG lens:

Environmental: irreversible destruction of a unique cultural and natural heritage site.
Social: Indigenous rights and loss of trust with local communities.
Governance: failure of board and management to treat community opposition and cultural heritage as material risks, not tick‑box compliance.

The risk event here is not “cultural heritage”. It is “destruction of a sacred site leading to loss of social licence, political and investor backlash, and leadership crisis”. The fact that approvals were in place did not prevent reputational loss or the internal disruption of a forced leadership change.

Once you see these stories together, the claim “ESG risk is business risk” stops being a slogan:

Ali Enterprises and Rana Plaza show social and governance failures turning into catastrophic operational, legal, and reputational losses.
Prologis shows environmental and social foresight translating into lower costs and stronger market position.
Juukan Gorge shows an environmental and social misjudgement leading to a governance crisis and loss of social licence.

That is why ESG‑related risks should sit inside the same enterprise risk management framework as credit, operational, and market risks, not in a separate CSR annex. Assess climate, environmental, social, and governance risks on the same likelihood and impact scales you use elsewhere, so boards can compare them directly and prioritise consistently.

Proactive ESG risk management then looks like any good risk practice:

Watching for weak signals and early warning indicators (accidents in similar factories, community complaints, climate policy shifts).
Stress‑testing strategies against multiple futures, including more aggressive climate policy or stricter human‑rights regulation.
Updating assumptions as technology, regulation, and stakeholder expectations move.

ESG does not create new categories of risk. It forces companies to confront risks they were already running but not properly measuring. Ultimately, value is shaped as much by social licence, institutional trust and regulatory trajectory as by commodity prices or quarterly earnings, and companies that treat ESG signals as peripheral optics problems discover too late that they were early warnings of business loss. Those that integrate them into core decision-making, capital allocation and board oversight are not being “ethical” in a narrow sense; they are protecting asset value, preserving optionality, and reducing the probability of reputational damage.

Sources

Catching Fire: Sri Lankan Men’s Cricket is Back!

NB: Yes I know they lost to Zimbabwe at home in a dead rubber within 10 minutes of my posting this 😂

Maybe? I have hopes. At least in T20s.

Vs Australia – T20 World Cup 2026, Group B, Pallekele (Feb 16, 2026)Sri Lanka 184/2 (18) beat Australia 181 (20) – won by 8 wickets.¹
Vs Oman – T20 World Cup 2026, Group B, Pallekele (Feb 12, 2026)Sri Lanka 225/5 (20) beat Oman 120/9 (20) – won by 105 runs.²
Vs Ireland – T20 World Cup 2026, Group B, Colombo (Feb 8, 2026)Sri Lanka 163/6 (20) beat Ireland 143 (19.5) – won by 20 runs.³
Vs England – 3rd T20I, Kandy (Feb 3, 2026)Sri Lanka 116 (19.3) lost to England 128/9 (20) – lost by 12 runs.⁴
Vs England – 2nd T20I, Kandy (Feb 1, 2026)Sri Lanka 189/5 (20) lost to England 173/4 (16.4) – lost by 6 wickets (DLS).⁵
Vs England – 1st T20I, Kandy (Jan 30, 2026)Sri Lanka 133 (16.2) lost to England 125/4 (15) – lost by 11 runs (DLS).⁶
Vs Pakistan – 3rd T20I, Dambulla (Jan 11, 2026)Sri Lanka 160/6 (12) beat Pakistan 146/8 (12) – won by 14 runs (DLS).⁷
Vs Pakistan – 2nd T20I, Dambulla (Jan 9, 2026)Match abandoned – no result.⁸
Vs Pakistan – 1st T20I, Dambulla (Jan 7, 2026)Sri Lanka 128 (19.2) lost to Pakistan 129/4 (16.4) – lost by 6 wickets.⁹
Vs Pakistan – Tri-series match, Rawalpindi (Nov 27, 2025)Pakistan 178/7 (20) lost to Sri Lanka 184/5 (20) – Sri Lanka won by 6 runs.¹⁰

So. Its not perfect, and England is far from a T20 loss one can take solace from, but this does look much more like that old punchy Sri Lanka than what we’ve seen in the last ten years, doesn’t it?

Just three years ago, Sri Lanka were ninth out of ten teams, winning just two matches (against the Netherlands and England) and losing seven in the 2023 ODI CWC.¹¹ Their bowling averaged 43.1, their economy rate was the worst in the tournament (6.5), and their catching efficiency — at 64.7% — was the worst of any team.¹² ¹³ Captain Dasun Shanaka was injured mid-tournament; Matheesha Pathirana and Lahiru Kumara were also ruled out.¹⁴ Eighteen different players turned up in the playing XI across nine games. This also meant they missed qualification for the 2025 Champions Trophy.¹⁵

Backroom
Meanwhile they had also failed to make the Super 8 round in the 2024 T20 world Cup, which led to their coach Chris Silverwood’s resignation.16 Into this breach walked Sanath Jayasuriya.¹⁷ ¹⁸ As far as I know, he hadn’t formally coached any teams before the national side,¹⁸ although he’d been chief selector twice,¹⁸ and… been banned for two years under ICC’s anti-corruption code.¹⁹ But the team’s results showed that he was bringing the magic of his playing days to the coaching job too:

2-0 ODI series win against India at home — Sri Lanka’s first bilateral ODI series victory over India in 27 years, since 1997.²⁰
Test win at The Oval against England — Sri Lanka’s first Test victory on English soil in a decade, since Headingley 2014.²¹
2-0 Test series whitewash of New Zealand at home — Sri Lanka’s first Test series win over the Kiwis in 15 years.²²
Series wins against West Indies in both ODIs (2-1) and T20Is (2-1).²³

In 2024, Sri Lanka participated in 14 bilateral series and won 11 of them. At home, they were near-invincible, winning nine out of ten series.²⁴

Sri Lanka also appointed Lasith Malinga as consultant fast‑bowling coach as part of their build‑up to the 2026 T20 World Cup at home.²⁵ Malinga has previously served as Sri Lanka’s fast bowling/ strategy coach in 2022.²⁶ Malinga captained Sri Lanka to the 2014 T20 World Cup title,²⁵ so he knows exactly how to manage high‑stakes tournament play, but he’s also been fast‑bowling coach/mentor in leagues like the IPL (Mumbai Indians, Rajasthan Royals),²⁷ bringing cutting‑edge tactical trends back into the Sri Lankan dressing room.

Random aside: when I first saw Jasprit Bumrah, I thought, yay, we’ve got someone like Lasith now.

In December 2025, Sri Lanka Cricket appointed R. Sridhar as fielding coach of the men’s team until the end of the 2026 T20 World Cup. Sridhar’s CV is serious:²⁸

India’s fielding coach from 2014 to 2021, across 300‑plus internationals and multiple World Cups.
Recent consultant work with Afghanistan.

And for the batting, Sri Lanka hired former India batting coach Vikram Rathour as a consultant batting coach on a short‑term contract, running from 18 January to 10 March 2026. The board was explicit in its statement: Rathour’s appointment had a “primary focus” on preparing for the 2026 T20 World Cup. Rathore:²⁹

Spent five years (2019–2024) as India’s batting coach, including their T20 World Cup 2024 title.
Has IPL experience as assistant coach with Rajasthan Royals.

Board Room
Joy Bhattacharjya wrote recently³⁰ about one of Indian cricket’s great, under‑appreciated superpowers: whatever circus is going on in the BCCI’s boardrooms, it almost never leaks into the running of the cricket itself. The cricket is insulated from the politics, and that insulation is part of the competitive advantage.

For years, Sri Lanka were the opposite of that. In November 2023 the ICC suspended Sri Lanka Cricket for “serious breach” of its obligation to run the game autonomously, citing explicit government interference.³¹ The sports minister had sacked the SLC board after the World Cup and tried to install an interim committee – which included political figures – only for the courts to reverse it within 24 hours.³² Sri Lanka’s sports law literally requires the minister to sign off on every national squad, and that’s been the case since the 1970s.³³ It hasn’t changed too much- their current sports minister recently had to hold a press conference defending recent changes.³⁴ Ministers don’t really have to do this in most countries.

Despite this noise, the selection outcomes in the last 18–24 months have been more coherent and cricket‑driven than they’ve been in years. Players are being given proper runs before the axe falls— a stark contrast to Maheesh Theekshana being discarded after two Tests and Jeffrey Vandersay after one.

Front page
Sri Lanka replaced Charith Asalanka with veteran all-rounder Dasun Shanaka as T20I captain in December 2025, just weeks before the World Cup.³⁵ Shanaka, the most experienced T20I captain in Sri Lanka’s history (53 matches leading the side), had been through three previous World Cups.³⁶ He seems to be the spine SL are building their team around.

But also, if you’re only catching results like me, it’s easy to miss just how many Sri Lankan players are having mini-career peaks at the same time.

Pathum Nissanka: he became the first centurion of the 2026 T20 World Cup, smashing 100 off 52 balls against Australia with 10 fours and 5 sixes, and walking them into the Super 8s with an eight‑wicket win.³⁷ He also scored Sri Lanka’s first-ever ODI double hundred (210* vs Afghanistan in 2024).³⁸

Kamindu Mendis: He’s less visible in comparison to the incandescent Nissanka, but in 2024 he reached 1000 Test runs in just 13 innings, equalling Don Bradman as joint second‑fastest ever and becoming the fastest Asian to the landmark.³⁹

Dunith Wellalage: In the 2024 home ODI series against India, he ripped through a full-strength batting line‑up with 5 for 27 in the decider, knocking India over for 138.²⁰ He’s also been central to West Indies getting routed for 89 in a T20I in Dambulla – 3 for 9 on debut in that series, on a pitch where West Indies went 37 balls without a boundary.⁴⁰

Another couple names I’ve found are Kamil Mishara and Eshan Malinga. Kamil Mishara keeps threatening to break games open in fast‑forward: he’s peeled off T20 innings like a 73* off 43 balls with 6 fours and 2 sixes,⁴¹ and a 76‑run blitz in the Pakistan tri‑series.⁴² That’s on top of an unbeaten maiden T20I fifty in a 192‑run chase, where he walked away with Player of the Match.⁴³ With the ball, Eshan Malinga has been quietly auditioning to become the next problem: a left‑arm quick with enough pace and movement to have best figures 4 for 33 in first‑class cricket,⁴⁴ ⁴⁵ and 13 wickets in seven games in his first IPL season.⁴⁶

Sri Lankan cricket taught me how to love Test cricket all the way back in 2007, when — dejected after an ignominious World Cup exit — I couldn’t even bring myself to look at my own team. So I watched Kumar Sangakkara and Mahela Jayawardene pile on runs instead.

Welcome back, neighbours. I’ve missed you. 🇱🇰🧿

Sources

My Immortals

There are moments in life that are too difficult to put into words. Print isn’t enough to hold them. India’s women cricketers winning their ODI semi final against the mighty, seemingly invincible Australians was that moment for me.¹ I knew we would win the world cup now. And I knew how much was about to change.

Later, on November 2, 2025, old heartbreaks from 2005 and 2017 had no place on the sofa with me as India walked out in blue, one more time, with one more chance not to be a beautiful tragedy. This time the World Cup was not in distant England or New Zealand; it was in our messy, noisy backyard, under floodlights that bounced off the Arabian Sea, and losing the toss was just par for the course now, not a death knell for dreams.²

Every fan carries a private pantheon. Let’s talk about some of mine: women who did not wait for the world to be ready for them.

Earlier
There is Mithali Raj, who spent two decades carrying Indian batting on her back, walking in that day not as a story in progress but as a living archive. She did not give speeches about revolution; she just kept showing up, year after year, with a straight drive that made time slow down: her 409 runs in 2017 stood as India’s World Cup record until Smriti broke it in 2025.³ ⁴ ⁵ ⁶ In my mind, she is the one who quietly set the table so that others could feast.

There is Jhulan Goswami, the long run‑up that felt like a pilgrimage and the wrist that could still snap a ball past the best batters in the world. Watching her in 2017⁷ ⁸ was like watching a bridge between eras: one foot in the days when women’s cricket hardly existed on TV, the other in an era she would not fully get to enjoy but had made possible. In a 20-year international career she took a record 255 ODI wickets for India.⁹ ¹⁰

Long ago
Shantha Rangaswamy captained India’s first women’s Test side in the 1970s,¹¹ ¹² scoring 6¹³ Test fifties and a hundred while also opening the bowling (21 Test wickets),¹³ and later became the first woman to receive the Arjuna Award for cricket.¹¹

Diana Edulji learned her craft bowling at boys in Badhwar Park,¹⁴ then became India’s slow left‑arm heartbeat for nearly two decades, captaining the side and taking 63 official Test wickets—still the most by any Indian woman—and 46 ODI wickets.¹⁵ She also fought equally hard off the field, using her long Railways career and later her role in the BCCI’s Committee of Administrators to push for jobs, contracts, and dignity for women cricketers.¹⁶ ¹⁷ ¹⁸

There are so many others who have built the spine of women’s cricket in this country vertebrate by vertebrate: Shubhangi Kulkarni, leg‑spinner and administrator, keeping the game alive in committee rooms;¹⁹ Sandhya Agarwal²⁰ and Anju Jain,²¹ scoring in forgotten World Cups; Purnima Rau²² ²³ and Neetu David,²⁴ taking wickets and then quietly building the teams that would come after them; Anjum Chopra, captaining in the lean years and then talking women’s cricket into Indian living rooms.²⁵

Now²⁶ ²⁷ ²⁸ ²⁹
But this tournament had others now- Deepti, Smriti, Amanjot, Richa, Shafali, Pratika, Jemima.

If Deepti was the tournament’s quiet star with 215 runs and 22 wickets, Smriti was the metronome- India’s highest run getter with 434 and multiple catches. Both determinedly carrying this country, up the massive Everest of a home world cup.

Shafali made 199 in just the two matches she played, with that 87 in the final… but my favourite Shafali moment has to be how she was grinning already while anticipating Sune Luus’ catch.

Pratika’s 308 runs, the second‑highest tally for India constantly helped us open (hehe) doors into the match, and who knows how many the poor kid may have had if she hadn’t been injured right at the precipice of the Cup itself?

Jemi made 292 runs, including an unbeaten 127 in the semi‑final vs Australia… in many ways she’s the one who won us the tournament. Her self belief through that match, her bravery through the tournament and even in the press conferences, constantly belied by her jolly nature… Perhaps she’s opened another door for us: talking so openly about mental health in cricket, for cricketers.³⁰

235 runs, with 12 sixes, the most by an Indian in the tournament: Richa Ghosh, keeper-bat par excellence.

Amanjot’s World Cup began with crisis. In the opener against Sri Lanka, India slid from 120 for 2 to 124 for 6, and a quiet stadium in Guwahati felt like it was reliving every old nightmare. On debut, she walked in next to Deepti and hit 57 off 56 – her maiden ODI fifty – in a 103‑run stand that yanked India to safety,³¹ ³² and later, in the final against SA, Wolvardt’s outrageous, tumbling catch that essentially won us the match and the Cup… you know the one.³³ Those are what I remember.

Sneh’s most talked‑about spell came against Pakistan, in a game that could easily have become sticky. She bowled eight overs for just two wickets on paper, but the control was the real story: a chokehold that kept the chase at arm’s length.

Radha had to wait, watching the first six matches from the bench while everyone discussed India’s “settled XI”. When she finally got her chance against Bangladesh, she made it impossible to ignore her again: 3 for 30, plus a brilliant direct‑hit run‑out. That performance is what pushed her name back into the semi‑final conversation and reminded everyone that India’s spin depth now extends all the way to the dugout.

Renuka’s World Cup was all about the early overs. Even when she went wicketless, like against Pakistan and England, she strangled the run rate – 2.9 an over in one match, 4.6 in another – so that chases never got to breathe. Her new‑ball spell against New Zealand, where she combined discipline with two top‑order wickets, set up the very platform from which Smriti and Pratika later tore the game away.

Harleen, who once went viral for that impossible boundary catch in England,³⁴ spent this World Cup doing the unglamorous versions of the same thing – sharp stops in the ring, calm hands on the rope, and those 20‑run cameos in the middle order that stop an innings from fraying.

Arundhati’s spells were often shorter, sharper: two‑ and three‑over bursts in the middle that changed the mood of an innings more than the scorecard, the kind of work you only notice when it’s missing. But her contribution often also came as that player who wasn’t in the XI, and still carried the team’s attitude. So brilliant.

Sree became one of those quiet tournament stories that suddenly erupts into view at the end. The 21‑year‑old left‑arm spinner from Kadapa took 14 wickets across the World Cup, leading India’s spin tally and being welcomed home to Andhra Pradesh like a local folk hero- as she should be.

Kranti’s World Cup became a small‑town fairy tale written in seam. Already known for a 6 for 52 against England earlier in the year,³⁵ she arrived at the tournament as a young quick with raw menace and left it as one of India’s biggest match‑winners. Her 3 for 20 against Pakistan in the group stage, sharing the new ball with Renuka, smashed the chase early and earned her a Player‑of‑the‑Match award that felt like a coming‑of‑age ceremony.

While Yastika’s job this time, was mostly to wait – pads on, gloves ready, rehearsing every scenario in her head in case anything happened to Richa, Uma showed us what the future looks like. A galaxy of stars awaits.

Harmanpreet Kaur went into this tournament as the oldest player in our XI, one day younger than me, and carrying at least ten extra years of history. She had seen 2005 from afar, 2017 from the middle, and every year since then from inside the weight room, the nets, the press conferences where she was asked about the word “chokers” without anyone quite using it. When my girl lifted the trophy, with the Bhangra and her team waiting for her, It’s difficult to explain the joy. Sometimes things can just be felt.

After the world cup, what struck me most was how lightly they wore their victory. No chest-thumping, no proclamations of dominance. Just gratitude, relief, and a deep, unmistakable sense of togetherness. Even Australia, knocked out in the semi‑final absorbed the defeat like a bruise, not a scar. And South Africa, losing the most important match of their life, were still gracious enough to accept hugs.

Women’s cricket, at its best, feels like the game stripped back to its point: the joy of being allowed to play. The records matter. The trophies matter. But they feel like by‑products of something more important: the right to take up space on a cricket field.

So when I call these women immortal, I don’t mean that highlights of Shafali’s 87 or Deepti’s 5 for 39 will live forever on some server farm in Dubai. I mean that a girl somewhere in the tiniest, dustiest, and possibly even the most gender-backward, village possible, balancing a taped tennis ball on her fingers, will one day hear these names and believe that the world will not need to be ready for her either.

📷 Reuters

Sources

Risk – IV: When Climate Risk Becomes Competitive Risk

In 2013, while conducting research for my Master’s thesis, I met corporate leaders who did not understand why climate change was something businesses were being held responsible for. They were often quite resentful, and yet, nearly all of their organisations had suffered from the Mumbai floods that happened that year- for one of them, a logistics company, the losses were so heavy they planned to shift their warehouses out of the city.

Climate change was viewed as a political issue, even as it was already disrupting operations. However, climate risk is no longer about ethics or disclosure; it is about competitive survival.

A viral picture of the Goldman Sachs building that remained powered and largely unscathed despite being in a mandatory evacuation zone during Hurricane Sandy in 2012.¹

The point is not abstract. During Hurricane Sandy in 2012, a widely shared image showed the Goldman Sachs building in lower Manhattan lit and operational while much of the surrounding area was dark. The firm had invested heavily in resilience infrastructure. Business continuity became a competitive advantage.

In a 2015 speech,² Mark Carney, then Governor of the Bank of England, argued that climate change is a “tragedy of the horizon” because its worst effects will be felt beyond the traditional horizons of business planning, political cycles, monetary policy, and financial regulation. Current decision‑makers therefore have weak incentives to act even though future generations will bear the costs, creating a structural mismatch between where the risks sit and where the power to respond lies.

He highlighted three channels through which climate change threatens financial stability:²

Physical risks: losses from more frequent and severe floods, storms, heatwaves, and other weather‑related disasters.
Liability risks: lawsuits and compensation claims against firms and directors for contributing to or failing to manage climate harms.
Transition risks: repricing of assets as policy, technology, and consumer preferences shift toward a low‑carbon economy, creating “stranded assets,” especially in fossil fuels.

Because standard risk models and planning cycles rarely look out beyond a decade, they miss non‑linear climate shocks and underestimate the scale of structural change required, especially under scenarios that keep warming well below 2°C.³ ⁴

Climate change is no longer a CSR issue; it is a core strategic, financial, and operational risk⁵ ⁶ affecting supply chains, asset location decisions, insurance costs, regulatory exposure, consumer demand, and access to capital.

Breaking the tragedy of the horizon requires extending risk management beyond conventional timeframes and embedding climate risk into today’s decision systems. We are already experiencing climate risk, and there is no way to fully insulate every asset from its effects.

For financial institutions, climate risk shows up as credit risk (borrowers’ ability to repay), market risk (asset price changes), operational risk (disruptions to operations), and reputational risk (backlash over financing high‑emitting activities). Empirical work on banks shows that exposures to transition risk are currently modest in portfolio terms but concentrated in specific sectors, and that banks signing net‑zero alliances have begun to reduce lending to the riskiest industries.⁷ ⁸

For corporations, the following may help:

Risk identification: Map climate hazards and drivers (heat, floods, drought, storms, sea‑level rise; carbon prices; regulations; technology shifts) to specific assets, operations, and supply chains.
Assessment and quantification: Use tools ranging from high‑level heatmaps to asset‑level hazard models and financial impact assessments (e.g., revenue at risk, cost of goods sold, capex needs).
Integration into Enterprise Risk Management (ERM): Incorporate climate risks into risk registers, materiality assessments, internal controls, and capital budgeting, with clear thresholds for escalation.

For financial institutions, more technical steps include:

Exposure mapping: Quantify portfolio exposure to vulnerable sectors and geographies as a share of lending and investment books.
Climate-adjusted credit analysis: Incorporate emissions intensity, transition plans, and physical risk exposure into underwriting and pricing.
Scenario stress testing: Use Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS) or equivalent scenarios to assess losses under combinations of policy tightening and physical shocks.

Regulators increasingly expect banks and insurers to demonstrate that climate risks are integrated into their internal capital adequacy assessments, risk appetite statements, and supervisory dialogues.⁹

For banks and investors, an important nuance is that reducing portfolio emissions too mechanically by divesting from high‑emitting sectors can undermine real‑economy transition, because those same sectors (power, steel, transport) require capital to decarbonise. Leading practice therefore shifts from simple “brown exclusion” to engagement, conditional finance, and transition‑linked instruments.¹⁰ ¹¹

All of this reframes climate change from a distant macro-risk into an immediate business continuity problem. The question is no longer whether climate risk matters, but how organisations operationalise it within decisions made today. Businesses and financial institutions must change how they allocate capital and design products. Climate‑aligned finance involves both reducing exposure to misaligned activities and growing exposure to solutions.¹²

For non‑financial corporates:

Shift capex toward energy efficiency, low‑carbon technologies, and resilience measures (e.g., relocating assets, flood‑proofing, cooling infrastructure), guided by scenario‑tested business cases.
Integrate internal carbon pricing into investment decisions and product design to reflect transition risk and incentivise low‑carbon choices.
Explore innovative risk‑sharing instruments, such as parametric insurance for climate‑related losses or resilience bonds linked to infrastructure upgrades.

For financial institutions:

Develop green and sustainability‑linked products (green bonds, sustainability‑linked loans, transition bonds) with clear use‑of‑proceeds criteria and performance‑based pricing.
Use portfolio alignment tools (e.g., implied temperature rise metrics, sectoral pathways) to steer lending and investment toward net‑zero‑compatible activities, while monitoring credit risk.
Avoid “paper decarbonisation” that simply sells high‑emitting assets to less regulated owners; instead, engage with clients to finance credible transition plans and set conditions for continued support.

Research shows that, so far, banks’ transitions have been gradual and often focus more on emissions metrics than on real‑economy outcomes, underscoring the need to link commitments to enforceable policies and incentives.

To translate this into an actionable agenda, organisations can focus on a staged approach:

Diagnose and govern: Brief boards on climate risk exposure. Assign clear oversight at board and executive levels.
Measure and disclose: Strengthen scenario analysis, emissions tracking, and exposure metrics. Build data systems aligned with emerging standards.
Integrate into risk and strategy: Embed climate considerations into ERM, capital budgeting, procurement, and sector strategies.
Align capital and incentives: Set science-based targets with interim milestones. Adjust lending and investment policies to phase out clearly misaligned activities while scaling transition and resilience finance.
Engage and collaborate: Work with regulators, alliances, clients, and suppliers to raise standards and avoid a race to the bottom.

Traditional business continuity frameworks assume that shocks are temporary, insurable, and geographically contained. Climate risk increasingly violates all three assumptions. The tragedy of the horizon is therefore not just about time, but about governance. Climate risks accumulate slowly, crystallise suddenly, and cascade across balance sheets, supply chains, and communities. By the time they appear in backward-looking metrics, strategic options have already narrowed.

For corporations and financial institutions alike, the challenge is no longer one of awareness or disclosure. It is whether decision-making systems — capital allocation, product design, credit assessment, and continuity planning — can be rewired to operate under conditions of deep uncertainty and irreversible change. Those that succeed will not eliminate climate risk (that’s impossible). They will internalise it early, adapt faster, and preserve optionality as the transition unfolds. Those that do not may find themselves where many firms were in the early 2010s—surprised by risks that were already visible, and outperformed by competitors who prepared earlier.

Sources

E-waste – I: The Problem

I’ve worked for a couple of projects on e-waste and e-waste recycling, and I wanted to revise that and see what’s going on in the space, so here is a series of posts about these topics.

In 2022, the world generated 62 million tonnes of electronic waste. Only 22.3% of that waste was properly recycled. By 2030, we’re on track to hit 82 million tonnes annually—while our recycling rate is projected to drop to 20%.¹ ² The gap between what we’re throwing away and what we’re recovering isn’t just an environmental problem. It’s an economic disaster not even bothering to hide, and yet few pay attention. That 62 million tonnes of waste contains an estimated $62 billion worth of recoverable materials—gold, silver, copper, rare earth metals—currently rotting in landfills or being processed in unsafe conditions.²

EEE
E-waste, according to the European Union’s WEEE (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment) Directive, is “equipment which is dependent on electric currents or electromagnetic fields in order to work properly”.³ India’s E-Waste Management Rules 2022 define it as “electrical and electronic equipment, whole or in part discarded as waste by the consumer or bulk consumer as well as rejects from manufacturing, refurbishment and repair processes”.⁴ The US Environmental Protection Agency divides e-waste into ten broad categories:⁵

Large household appliances: refrigerators, air conditioners, washing machines
Small household appliances: toasters, coffee makers, vacuum cleaners
IT equipment: computers, laptops, monitors, printers
Consumer electronics: televisions, smartphones, tablets, gaming consoles
Lamps and luminaires: LED bulbs, fluorescent tubes
Toys: electronic games, remote-controlled cars
Tools: power drills, electric saws
Medical devices: blood pressure monitors, glucose meters
Monitoring and control instruments: thermostats, smoke detectors
Automatic dispensers: vending machines, ATMs

And critically, this includes batteries of all types:⁶

Alkaline and zinc-carbon batteries: the everyday AA, AAA batteries we use in remotes and toys
Lithium-Ion batteries (Li-ion): found in smartphones, laptops, electric vehicles—these have high energy density and long life, but are highly reactive and flammable
Lead-acid batteries: used in vehicles and industrial applications—low cost but heavy and toxic
Nickel-cadmium batteries (NiCd): known for consistent performance but containing toxic cadmium

Why should we recycle e-waste?
Why not? Electronics contain both valuable materials and dangerous ones, and throwing them away is economically silly and environmentally irresponsible. For one, recovering gold produces 80% less carbon emissions than primary mining.⁷ Recycling lithium-ion batteries instead of mining new metals reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 58-81%, water use by 72-88%, and energy consumption by 77-89%.⁸ ⁹ ¹⁰ If we extend the lifespan of existing devices—through repair, reuse, and high-quality refurbishment—we drastically reduce the need to manufacture new ones.

Hazard
Electronic devices are chemical cocktails. Circuit boards, batteries, and screens contain an array of hazardous substances:¹¹ ¹² ¹³

Lead: damages the nervous system, kidneys, and reproductive system. Particularly harmful to children’s developing brains. Found in cathode ray tubes (those old bulky TVs and monitors) and soldering materials.
Mercury: a potent neurotoxin that accumulates in the body, causing neurological and developmental issues. Present in flat-screen displays, fluorescent lamps, and some batteries.
Cadmium: linked to kidney damage, lung cancer, and bone disease. Found in rechargeable NiCd batteries, old CRT screens, and printer drums.
Chromium (specifically hexavalent chromium): a recognized carcinogen that can cause lung cancer, respiratory issues, and skin irritation. Extremely soluble, so it easily contaminates groundwater.
Brominated flame retardants: used in plastic components to prevent fires, but they release toxic dioxins when burned or heated. These cause hormonal disorders.
Beryllium: found in power supply boxes. Exposure can cause chronic lung disease.

The World Health Organization has identified e-waste as one of the fastest-growing solid waste streams posing serious health risks.¹⁴ When e-waste is dumped in landfills, these toxic materials leach into soil and groundwater. When it’s burned—as happens in much of the informal recycling sector—they’re released into the air as poisonous gases. Studies in communities near informal e-waste recycling sites show elevated rates of respiratory illnesses, cardiovascular problems, neurological disorders, and cancers. Children and pregnant women are particularly vulnerable.¹⁵ ¹⁶

Urban Mining
Electronics are concentrated sources of valuable materials—far more concentrated than their natural ore deposits:¹⁷ ¹⁸ ¹⁹

Gold: one tonne of circuit boards contains approximately 350 grams of gold. To put that in perspective, the gold content in circuit boards is 800 times higher than in natural gold ore. Mining one tonne of gold ore might yield just 5 grams of gold; circuit boards yield 350 grams.
Silver: that same tonne contains about 2 kilograms of silver.
Copper: 120 kilograms per tonne of circuit boards.
Other precious metals: aluminum, platinum, cobalt, palladium, rare earth elements.

To make this concrete: recycling one million cell phones can yield approximately 35,000 pounds of copper, 772 pounds of silver, and 75 pounds of gold. The total value of recoverable materials from global e-waste in 2022 was estimated at $62 billion.¹⁹This is what researchers call “urban mining”—recovering valuable materials from discarded electronics rather than extracting them from the earth.²⁰

If e-waste is valuable, dangerous, and growing, why is it still handled so badly? The answer isn’t technology or awareness. It’s incentives—and the policy instrument meant to fix this problem may be quietly making it worse. In the next post, I’ll unpack EPR (Extended Producer Responsibility) — the policy tool we’ve pinned our hopes on, and why it’s not delivering what it promises yet.

Sources

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