You will be apt to find, if you peeked into a backyard of a small-scale papermaking mill — like the one in Meerut shown above — imported wastepaper dumped carelessly.
The Indian Agro-Recycled Paper Manufacturers Association (IARPMA) says there are about 422 such mills. But why do these mills import wastepaper? Don’t the sorry contingents of rag pickers and the itinerant kabadiwallahs, who do daily rounds of neighbourhoods in almost every Indian town, supply them enough? Paper industry representatives and many experts say that their stuff is bad quality and so cannot be recycled.