Rs 22 crore spent, yet Taj pollution up

Air pollution levels around the Taj Mahal are rising again, despite the government having spent Rs 220 crore trying to reduce them.

Updated on: Jul 1, 2010, 23:15:31 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Air pollution levels around the Taj Mahal are rising again, despite the government having spent Rs 220 crore trying to reduce them.

The level of nitrogen dioxide (NOX) in the area around the Shah Jahan-built monument of love at Agra, 195 km southeast of Delhi is now higher than in 1996, when the government began tackling the problem. Against 22 ug per cubic metre of air in 1996, the current level is 30 ug/m3.

NOX can affect the sparkle of the monument’s marble façade.

“There is increasing air pollution, which may be attributed to rise in man and vehicular population,” said the National Environment Engineering Research Institute (NEERI), Nagpur, in a recent report.

The report had been sought by the environment ministry to gauge the impact of eight centrally funded projects started in 1998 to reduce air pollution in the Taj Trapezium Zone (TTZ). The projects, on which Rs 220 crore has been spent, were started after the Supreme Court intervened in the early 1990s to check Taj air pollution.

The NEERI report says pollution levels in the TTZ kept reducing till 2002, after which air toxicity began to rise.

Two other major air pollutants are respirable suspended particulate matter (RSPM) and suspended particulate matter (SPM). Their levels too are rising in the TTZ. They are currently 66 per cent and 83 per cent in that region, which is higher than national air quality standards.

The NEERI report found the air quality around the Taj worse than that in 10 major urban areas, including Faridabad, Kolkata and Pune.

The government’s effort to improve the quality of ground water in the area has failed too, the report said. “Salinity of underground water has not improved despite construction of Gokul barrage,” it stated.

This is primarily because of the increase in groundwater extraction around the Taj. The groundwater level has fallen by four meters in seven years since 2007. It was also being polluted by the discharge of effluents from the local industry.

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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