Pollution monitoring a must, but who’ll monitor it?

By March 2015, thousands of industries across India will have to install online pollution monitoring systems but the state pollution boards do not have the means for compliance.

Updated on: Dec 7, 2014, 24:40:15 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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By March 2015, thousands of industries across India will have to install online pollution monitoring systems but the state pollution boards do not have the means for compliance.

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The Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) earlier this year had asked industries in 17 high emission sectors to install the online monitoring system for emissions and effluents.

The notification issued under air and water acts had threatened of penal action if the industries failed to comply. Under the rule, the GPS based system had to be connected with the state pollution boards where the industry was situated for regular monitoring.

But, before issuing the notification the CPCB did not improve capacity of the state pollution control boards to monitor such a large number of industries.

‘The pollutiom control boards do not have the software to ensure that the industry does not tamper with the equipment to show compliance and ensure caliberation,’ said an industry source, who had been in touch with the state pollution control board on this issue.

He also added that the boards does not have even server strength to ensure such a large number of data can be fed and available in public domain on real time basis.

The CPCB officials admit that many state boards lack technical expertise to run such a system. “Over 10,000 industries will have to be monitored in Uttar Pradesh alone and it will mean one officer dealing with hundred of industries,” a CPCB official said, terming the online monitoring an impossible task.

The official also pointed out that in high mining states like Jharkhand, Odisha and Chhattisgarh even connecting far flung mines with the state pollution board servers will be a problem.

Industry believes that the entire online polluting programme has been pushed without much thought and may result in another form on ‘inspector raj’.

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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