Pollution body to tighten screws on liquor firms

Liquor companies in the country can soon claim that they are going green.

Updated on: Aug 9, 2012, 23:11:53 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Liquor companies in the country can soon claim that they are going green.

The Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) will ask distilleries across India to ensure that there is zero discharge of pollutants into water bodies and the ground. This comes after the CPCB found that there was high discharge of pollutants from 24 distilleries into Ganga.

The discharge from liquor factories normally contains very low dissolved oxygen and high quantity of chemicals, which adversely impact aquatic life. Distilleries are among the 17 categories of major polluting industries in India, the environment ministry had recently told Parliament.

The pollution board, which has tested the discharge from distilleries in several states, including UP, Punjab and Haryana, found that most of them were not complying with the norms especially on dissolved oxygen, a key criterion in measuring quality of water.

Taking cognisance of high emissions, environment minister Jayanthi Natarajan said, “We will adopt a zero tolerance policy towards discharge of pollutants into water bodies.”

The ministry has asked the pollution board to issue “adequate” directions to the distilleries to install equipment to trap pollutants and treat waste water. “All pollutants can be removed from distillery waste water,” a CPCB scientist said.

To ensure that there is fair play, a ministry official added that the distilleries would get about a year to comply with the norms. If they fail to comply, the CPBC will issue closure notices.

The pollution regulator has also instructed paper industry on Ganga river basin to comply with pollution norms by the end of December or face closure. “We will also issue notices to petro-chemicals industries for meeting the emission and discharge norms,” Natarajan said.

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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