Pollution regulations ignore human factor; Patancheru-Bollaram residents in trouble
Hyderabad: It is not just the state's Pollution Control Board, even the Central Pollution Control Board and Ministry of Environment and Forests do not seem to care about people’s suffering from pollution.
Along with eight other Critically Polluted Areas (CPA), the freeze on entry of new companies in the Patancheru-Bolaram industrial cluster due to the CEPI score of above 70 in 2009 was put aside by the MoEF in 2014.
New companies were allowed to be established by getting environment clearances from the MoEF as CPCB had failed to revise the CEPI scoring methodology, which it was told to do in 2013.
This lifting of moratorium came with some conditions which were not fulfilled. The ministry had instructed that the CPCB's regional office and a third party should monitor the location frequently.
It was only in November last that a committee of two appointed by the MoEF visited Hyderabad to monitor the Patancheru-Bolaram industrial cluster. The report is yet to be released.
The CPCB was also directed in 2014 to reassess all CPAs in the country as per the revised CEPI methodology within a year. However, it is only now that CPCB has come out with the revised CEPI.
An action plan on the eight CPAs was also directed to be submitted, which would be jointly reviewed by CPCB and the state pollution control boards on a quarterly basis, but this too has been ignored.
CEPI formula spells trouble
The Central Pollution Control Board's revised Comprehensive Environmental Pollution Index (CEPI) formula might spell doom for people living near Hyderabad's Patancheru-Bolaram industrial cluster.
CEPI is a methodology of scoring a given location out of 100 penalty points calculated as per a formula based on various parameters to determine environmental quality of the location.
CEPI scores were first calculated in the country in 2009 for 88 industrial clusters including the Patancheru-Bolaram cluster which scored 70.07 penalty points, making it fall under one of the 43 Critically Polluted Areas (CPA) in the country where entry of new companies was banned.
However, the CPCB has revised the methodology for calculating CEPI, and due to “requirement of huge funds”, “time consuming nature” and “complexity”, removed the B2, B3, C1 and C3 components that existed in the earlier version of CEPI calculation. These four components had played a major role in pushing the industrial cluster in the CPA category.
Mathematically speaking, these four components contributed to nearly 27 per cent of Patancheru-Bolaram cluster”s CEPI score of 70.07, which would otherwise have been around 51.
