Sahil yaduvanshi, 4, loves airplanes. He does not have to go far to look at one. He just has to peer out of his play school window and look up every few minutes to see one. “This is Cattie…,” he shouts out to his friend Pushpesh as he looks out. Sahil enjoys the sight of the planes, and wants to become a pilot when he grows up. His only complaint is to do with the roar of the planes. “I cannot hear my teacher and my friends because of the noise,” Sahil said. He studies in Aadyant pre-school in Vasant Kunj in Delhi. Most of his friends find it difficult to concentrate after a third runway—Runway 29—became operational at the Indira Gandhi airport in September 2008. “The children get disoriented as there is an airplane flying by every few minutes. We have to repeat lessons and even raise our voices to be heard,” said Bhavina Bembi, a school counsellor.

In flight path The problem of noise disturbance is not restricted to the school but the entire residential area from Andheria Modh, east of the airport, to Bijwasan to its west. These localities are in the airport flight path. “We got the noise levels in Vasant Kunj area checked privately and found it varies between 75 and 100 decibels,” said Anil Sood, president of the non-profit Chetna.

This is much more than the limit of 55 dB during the day and 45 dB at night set by the Central Pollution Control Board (cpcb) for residential areas. Before the runway was built, the noise level varied from 59-65 dB, according to studies carried out by the cpcb in areas around the airport in 2004 and 2007. Environmental clearances were also given a go by. Sood said he had filed an RTI application and found no environment impact assessment was carried out before constructing the third runway. The Delhi International Airport (Private) Ltd (dial), the company that manages the airport, has now agreed to undertake noise abatement measures. This was after a meeting with the Environment Pollution (Prevention and Control) Authority (epca) on January 10 to discuss noise abatement measures.

Measure noise “We are interacting with resident welfare associations of Vasant Kunj and other localities. We will take corrective measures,” a dial spokesperson said. dial has promised to install six aircraft noise monitoring systems (anms) by June this year. This conforms with cpcb guidelines for monitoring noise pollution around airports, issued in June 2008. “Right now airports hire contractors to measure noise pollution.

They use a simple sound level meter. An anms is a complete set of sound level meters along with software connected to the air traffic control room and measure the noise of each aircraft that lands or takes off,” said a cpcb official. He said this would help compare data of aircraft. These instruments cost Rs 50 lakh each and would have to be imported. “Class 1 sound level meters, made as per international specifications, cost about Rs 10 lakh and come with their own software. An anms will have three or four of these devices, said Piyush Kumar a sales engineer with Josts Engineering Company Ltd, an importer. As per the minutes of the epca meeting, the airport managers have proposed closing Runway 29 during the night and switching off one or two engines at the time of landing to lower noise levels. Phasing out old noisy aircraft and using only one runway during off-peak hours have also been proposed. Once that happens Sahil has better chances to work towards his desire to fly.

A cpcb official said it is difficult to maintain the noise standards in residential areas near airports at par with other localities. New standards are being worked out, he said. In most countries, noise limits in the airport vicinity vary from 57 dB to 90 dB with a night curfew in many of them. Residents around the airport want a ban on flights at night with immediate effect.

A fire at Ankleshwar forced India to rethink how it handles hazardous waste. Drums carrying dangerous industrial sludge flew amid leaping flames and burst in the air at a waste storage at the industrial complex in Bharuch district of Gujarat on April 3 last year. Ash fell all around. People in nearby villages were told to evacuate; many suffered coughing, headache, nausea and burning sensation in the nose and throat.

It could have turned into a disaster worse than the Bhopal gas tragedy but for the change in the wind direction away from other factories (see ‘Bhopal to Bharuch’, Down To Earth, April 30, 2008).

Fire at Ankleshwar exposed careless handling of waste
Photographer:Ravleen Kaur

The fire burnt 250 tonnes of toxic industrial waste at the treatment, storage and disposal facility or tsdf in Ankleshwar. This waste had been sent there for incineration at 1,100°C because it was too dangerous to reuse or dump in a landfill. And burning it under ordinary conditions could release pollutants like cancer-causing dioxins and furans.

Waste oil and sludge—all paid for by industries—were leaking from barrels at Bharuch Enviro Infrastructure Ltd (BEIL), the tsdf that caught fire. Though BEIL —of which pesticide giant United Phosphorous is a major equity holder—cannot incinerate more than 50 tonnes of waste a day, it had crammed over 12,800 tonnes in sheds with narrow passage in between.

Prompted by the accident, the Central Pollution Control Board (cpcb) in April 2008 set up a committee under its former adviser R K Garg to stipulate detailed and explicit guidelines for storage of incinerable hazardous waste at captive incinerators and tsdfs, which are landfills with or without incinerators. In November, the board announced new guidelines (see Storage guidelines). Till then tsdfs were not bound by any time limit for storing hazardous incinerable waste, though being reactive and inflammable, the waste is risky to store— BEIL and the factory inspector in Ankleshwar believe the April fire occurred due to a reaction between the waste and the steel drum in which it was stored. Only industries were told not to store such waste for more than 90 days on their premises.

The committee decided that a tsdf should not store hazardous waste for more than six months. It noted sampling, analysis and mixing of the right kind of waste before incineration could take three months, but considering the time an incinerator requires for repairs, which is an annual affair, six months’ storage time is appropriate.

BEIL had waste lying there for up to two years, even though the Gujarat Pollution Control Board (gpcb) had allowed it 90 days’ storage time.

Industries in India produce hundreds of tonnes of waste every day that cpcb classifies harmful to our health and the environment. It can be toxic, flammable, corrosive, radioactive or reactive. Of this inflammable organic waste produced by industries like pesticide, pharmaceutical and refinery has to be incinerated. These are mostly synthetic chemicals that, scientists say, do not easily break down in the environment and deposit in human bodies through the food chain. They interfere with our biochemistry that affects our intelligence, immunity, behaviour and reproduction. Benzene used in bulk drug factories, for example, is a carcinogen. Exposure to it for a long time can be fatal.

Ten months after the fire—and despite orders to do so—neither gpcb nor the factory inspector of the area nor BEIL itself knows the nature of the waste burnt and the company it came from. On July 8, cpcb issued directions to BEIL regarding safety—like installing smoke and fire detectors, water sprinklers, providing ventilation, labelling drums to identify waste—under the Environment Protection Act 1986. The facility was asked to submit an action plan for incinerating the 12,800 tonnes of waste lying on its premises, and not to accept fresh waste till it had done so.

BEIL was given three months to act upon the directions. It trimmed the size of some sheds to create a wider passage between them, laid the storage areas with concrete flooring, installed fire hydrants and smoke detectors and labelled the drums.

“We have spent over Rs 7 crore on upgrading. Each drum has been painted and labelled as per the categories in hazardous waste rules,” said P N Parmeswaran, vice-president (environment) of United Phosphorus.

However, 4,000 tonnes of waste was still lying at the facility in December end. According to cpcb, 7,000 tonnes remained to be treated on October 13. So in more than six months, the company could take care of only 5,800 tonnes. Of this 1,000 tonnes were sent to another tsdf, Gujarat Enviro Protection and Infrastructure, in Surat, according to the documents obtained from gpcb under RTI. As per BEIL’s stated capacity at least 7,500 tonnes should have been incinerated in six months.

Environmental activists in Ankleshwar are now angry over the Madhya Pradesh High Court’s order in December allowing BEIL to incinerate 350 tonnes of toxic waste from the Union Carbide (now Dow Chemical) plant in Bhopal. “When they are not able to manage the waste of this industrial area, how can they take care of the waste in the Union Carbide factory?” asked Zia Pathan, a lawyer in Ankleshwar and member of Paryavaran Suraksha Samiti, a non-profit active in Gujarat.

Will BEIL be nailed? No criminal case is filed against it (see Where is the punishment?). Pollution control boards can act against the BEIL director under section 15 of the Environment Protection Act in case of loss of health or vegetation, for which the culprit can get jailed for five years. But they have not done so. Proving impact on health and vegetation is not easy. “If people have breathing disorders how can one know it is because of BEIL?” asked Pathan.

The waste has been lying at the plant since 1984 when the Bhopal gas tragedy occurred. The 350 metric tonnes of waste is at the centre of a legal wrangle between Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat governments.

The Gujarat government did not comply with similar orders passed by the high court in October 2007. A fire at the hazardous waste treatment facility (managed by Bharuch Enviro Infrastructure Ltd. or beil) and opposition from local non-profits were cited as main reasons for non-compliance.

The high court then got the beil site inspected by the Central Pollution Control Board (cpcb) which said that a backlog of 6,964 tonnes of waste would have to be cleared first. This finding was taken into account by the court when it said its order should be complied with in six weeks. Back of the envelop calculations however show that beil will have 2,464 tonnes excess waste to dispose and not 1,564 tonnes waste as estimated by cpcb in its affidavit. Therefore the plant will not be in a position to take in more stocks of toxic waste in January despite court deadline.

S K Nanda, state principal secretary for environment, said there was no question of

“allowing the waste to be brought to Gujarat”.

He was hopeful the issue would be resolved in the Supreme Court that is hearing an appeal of the state against contempt proceedings for not complying with earlier orders.

The apex court on November 8 had directed that chief secretaries of Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat and officials of the Union Ministry of Commerce should jointly decide on the modalities for disposing the waste. A joint report will be filed in the Supreme Court in January end when the case is scheduled for hearing. This will be much before the High Court deadline expires, Nanda said.

It’s official. The Central Pollution Control Board (cpcb), the nodal body for regulating environmental norms in India, is being “reduced to a near-defunct body”. The parliamentary standing committee on science and technology, environment and forests for the first time took note of the problems ailing cpcb in a report tabled in Parliament on October 21.

Issues like unqualified members and lack of enforcement power have long plagued the central and state pollution control boards (spcbs), a fact acknowledged by the board heads. The committee also noticed that the scarcity of technical staff was affecting the functioning of the boards.

“The key posts in cpcb and spcbs are being manned by officers of the Indian Administrative Service or bureaucrats who neither possess the necessary capabilities and expertise in properly managing and planning pollution control activities nor have enough time to pay attention to these activities,”

the report said.

In 2004-05, of the total cpcb and spcb staff, only 48 per cent were technical. An earlier report by a Supreme Court monitoring committee had stated that 77 per cent of the chairpersons and 55 per cent of the member secretaries of spcbs were not qualified to hold the post. The parliamentary committee report also criticized having part-time chairpersons by many state boards and said that only a full-time chairperson with adequate knowledge, background and experience in environment management could do justice to the post.

Dilip Biswas, former chairperson of cpcb, said during his tenure he had quite a few members on the board who were unqualified for the post.

“Meetings were more like a ritual than platforms for discussing important issues because many members were illiterate as far as environment was concerned. Many a times they would not even turn up for meetings.”

The law was to be faulted, said Biswas not the people as it did not define the exact qualifications of the board members. “Also, there is drastic shortage of general staff,” he said.

Though cpcb is an autonomous body, it is controlled by the Ministry of Environment and Forests. Most of its members are ministry representatives. The acting chairperson of the board is the joint secretary of the ministry. The Water Act, under which the board was formed, allows the Central government to supersede cpcb in certain cases. “Such a provision renders cpcb to act as mere puppet in the hands of the Centre and does not allow any space for independent and autonomous functioning,” the report said. Citing the ministry’s 2002 decision to delegate punitive powers to cpcb with the condition that if need be the Centre may revoke the decision, the report said, “If all the powers and functions were to be concentrated in the hands of the ministry …such an apex body is untenable.”

The report has raised concerns about the cpcb data on air and water monitoring. It said hazardous pollutants like volatile organic compounds, ozone and aromatic hydrocarbons were not being monitored. Of the 332 monitoring stations in the country, several are not working and the data is not updated regularly. There is no central agency to set standards for emissions.
Even if the standards are finalized by a technical body, the ministry takes a long time to notify them, as has happened in the case of the sponge iron industry.

Low salaries to the technical personnel and lack of training also contributed to cpcb’s failure, it stated.