Imran Mansoori kneels in an alleyway picking over a tangle of electronic trash. He's one of thousands of e-waste workers in India's capital, Delhi, which has emerged as one of Asia's biggest e-waste processing hubs.
Much of the junk on Imran's pile is familiar - the shell of a TV remote, a shattered Wi-Fi router and a squashed credit/debit card reader. 
The grimy lane where Imran works is strewn with the debris of the e-age. One gloomy hole in the wall is crammed with neatly stacked flat screen televisions. Across the alley from Imran, a young man, maybe in his teens, sits cross-legged in a tiny room using a chisel to separate electronic components. The wall beside him is piled waste-high with circuit boards.
Imran's job is to find items of value that can be sold in one of Delhi's vibrant scrap markets. Sometimes he gets lucky and finds a component containing a precious metal. "I know where the gold is," he says with a smile.
Imran's alley is in Shastri Park, a teeming, dirt-poor neighbourhood in Delhi's east. This region is one of the city's e-waste processing hotspots. Some electronic waste in India is processed by large firms, including a division of Australian-based recycling giant Sims Metals Management. But the majority of the e-waste that ends up in Delhi is dismantled by informal family businesses operating from small shops and homes without even rudimentary safety precautions such as masks, gloves or ventilation.
Much of the e-waste is gadgets discarded by India's 1.2 billion people but there is concern that a growing amount is arriving from other countries, including Australia. A 2014 report by peak business group, the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (Assocham), said Delhi "is emerging as the world's dumping yard for e-waste".
Priti Mahesh, the chief program co-ordinator with the environment group Toxics Link, said that despite restrictions on the importation of foreign e-waste into India, a lot makes its way to Delhi illegally.
Dropping off unwanted electronic gadgets at a council depot has become a familiar routine for many Australian households. The federal government's National Television and Computer Recycling Scheme has a target to recycle 80 per cent of waste by 2026-27. While most collected gadgets are dismantled in Australia, some sub components, including most printed circuit boards, are sent overseas for further processing.
The federal Department of Environment said about 14,700 tonnes of "dismantled e-waste fractions" (such as circuit boards) were exported last financial year. The largest recipients of Australia's exported e-waste were China, Indonesia, and Japan.
So how many parts from Australia's discarded laptops and TVs end up in the back streets of Delhi? No one really knows. A department statement said it had "no record of a permit ever being granted to export material fractions derived from e-waste to India." (Some e-waste components are not considered hazardous and do not require an export permit.)
But in an increasingly globalised world economy, strong regulations in Australia can't prevent its e-waste from being re-exported to second or third destinations, such as India.
A recent investigation by journalist Rohit Inani, published in the journal Himal, said a report tabled in the Indian Parliament named Australia, along with Canada, South Korea and Brunei, as the source of an e-waste shipment seized in the south Indian city of Chennai in 2010.
Delhi's long-standing markets for scrap metals and other waste materials have helped nurture the city's e-waste industry. Cheap labour is another attraction. Assocham estimates Delhi alone has about 250,000 workers involved in processing e-waste. Industry observers say women are typically paid between $2.10 and $3.15 a day, while men can earn up to $5.20 a day. Assocham's 2014 report claimed about 35,000-45,000 children aged between 10-14 years were "engaged in various e-waste activities".
The work is hazardous. Many electronic gadgets contain toxins such as lead, cadmium, chromium and flame retardants. "Computers, televisions and mobile phones are most dangerous because they have high levels of lead, mercury and cadmium - and they have short life-spans so are discarded more [often]", Assocham's health committee chairman, Dr B.K. Rao, said in a recent statement.
"The fact that so much e-waste is recycled in the informal sector creates a huge burden in terms of environment and health," Mahesh said.
"You have heavy metal contamination and other chemical discharges, meaning your air, water and soil is getting contaminated.
"People sit and work without any safety precautions such as gloves, masks and so on."
It is common for small children to be in the vicinity of toxic fumes and waste.
A report on India's e-waste workers by Assocham, released in   June, said about 76 per cent suffer from respiratory ailments like "breathing difficulties, irritation, coughing, choking [and] tremors" due to improper safeguards.
"They are being gradually and slowly poisoned," Mahesh said.