Ghaziabad most polluted industrial cluster in the country

Ghaziabad, which is part of the National Capital Region (NCR), is the most polluted industrial zone in the country, which means environment ministry will not clear any new industrial project in the booming township. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Sep 20, 2013, 03:12:17 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Ghaziabad, which is part of the National Capital Region (NCR), is the most polluted industrial zone in the country, which means environment ministry will not clear any new industrial project in the booming township.

The country's pollution watchdog, the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB), had found the implementation of an environment management plan more than two years ago had failed to reduce pollution in eight of the 47 critically polluted clusters studied for air, land and water pollution levels.

Ghaziabad is among these clusters.

"Our evaluation shows the plans have more or less remained on paper," a senior pollution board official said. But the findings are an indictment of CPCB's functioning too, as it failed to monitor the implementation of the plan.

The ministry had imposed a moratorium on new industries in 47 clusters in 2010 on the basis of Comprehensive Environmental Pollution Index (CEPI), a measure of air, water and land pollution.

The moratorium on most of the clusters was lifted within a year after the state governments assured greener practices.

But an assessment carried out between February and April this year found pollution levels in some of these clusters, including Ghaziabad, have not changed much. In fact, Ghaziabad in 2013 edged out Vapi in Gujarat, the most polluted industrial cluster in 2010.

Ghaziabad scored 85 on the scale of 1-100 (100 being the most polluted) compared to 84.5 for Vapi, which made some improvement since 2010, while Ghaziabad largely remained the same.

Panipat in Haryana, which also falls in the NCR, was another township with CEPI score of more than 80.

A score of more than 70 mean that an industrial area is critically polluted and needs immediate remedial measures.

The ministry also withdrew state governments' powers to make any decision in these clusters and vested with itself the powers to allow upgrade of technology to reduce environmental degradation.

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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