Noise pollution levels to be monitored

After air pollution, you will be able to find out the noise pollution level of your residential area in seven cities across India from November.

Updated on: Sep 23, 2010, 23:54:46 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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After air pollution, you will be able to find out the noise pollution level of your residential area in seven cities across India from November.

Pollution watchdog the Central Pollution Control Board is putting up online stations to monitor noise levels round the clock in these cities. “The information will be available to people through our website on real time basis,” said board’s chairman S.P. Gautam.

Noise pollution in most cities is above the norm and is rising at an alarming rate. As per a study done in 2008 by environment ministry, noise pollution levels in residential areas like Saket in Delhi, and in south Kolkata were 30-40 per cent higher than the standard of 55 dB.

“Mumbai was much better,” said a ministry official. “There citizens are active and police has strictly enforced noise pollution rules”. The problem is also emerging in towns such as Gurgaon, Navi Mumbai, Mathura and Agra.

In absence of data, no action is taken by authorities to control noise pollution. “Once we have regular data we can suggest the authorities the corrective steps they should take,” Gautam said.

From November, the first set of monitoring centres will become functional in Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Lucknow. Each city will have five monitoring stations

covering industrial, residential and commercial areas. The data will then be fed into a central server at CPCB headquarters, which will be displayed on the website.

In the next two years, 25 more cities would be added to the network and all urban areas will covered in five years time.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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