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Central Pollution Control Board
The Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) on Wednesday rejected allegations of manipulation of air quality data and said the monitoring stations are automated and no human intervention is possible in calculation and monitoring. Delhi government has been accused of spraying water around air-quality monitoring stations to lower dire readings and even switching them off during key pollution periods - for instance, when firecrackers increased the pollution load during Diwali in October. "The monitoring and data collection is automated... the stations generate data every 15 minutes and AQI is calculated every hour, following which the average AQI is generated. These stations are not manual, and hence any kind of human intervention or manipulation is not possible," CPCB Chairman Vir Vikram Yadav told reporters here. Responding to a query about allegations of sprinkling of water around monitoring stations to manipulate air quality data, Yadav said, "The monitoring stations have been set u
The Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) has pulled up the Uttarakhand Pollution Control Board over continued violations by three common effluent treatment plants in Haridwar, Pantnagar and Sitarganj, and directed it to take immediate action, including levying environmental compensation. In an order issued on Tuesday, the CPCB said the plants, located in industrial areas developed by the State Infrastructure and Industrial Development Corporation of Uttarakhand Limited (SIIDCUL), were meeting neither the inlet effluent quality standards nor the treated effluent quality norms. The central board's inspection revealed that all three plants -- Haridwar of 9 MLD (million litres per day) capacity, Pantnagar (4 MLD) and Sitarganj (4 MLD) -- were consistently non-compliant with treated effluent quality standards for key parameters such as biochemical oxygen demand (BOD), chemical oxygen demand (COD) and heavy metals like iron, chromium and nickel. Common effluent treatment plants (CETPs)
The Central Pollution Control Board has directed all state pollution control boards and pollution control committees to install Online Continuous Emission and Effluent Monitoring System (OCEMS) at waste-to-energy plants and sanitary landfill sites to strengthen surveillance and ensure compliance with environmental standards. The order dated August 12 asked states to submit 'action taken reports' on the status of waste-to-energy units by August 18. It said that all operational and upcoming municipal solid waste incineration-based waste-to-energy plants must install and operate OCEMS for real-time tracking of pollutants such as particulate matter, sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, hydrogen fluoride, hydrogen chloride and carbon monoxide. Similarly, all waste-to-energy plants and landfill sites are required to put in place OCEMS for treated leachate, tracking parameters such as pH, total suspended solids, biochemical oxygen demand, chemical oxygen demand, ammoniacal nitrogen and ...
The Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) has released more than Rs 238 crore to nine urban local bodies (ULBs) in the NCR as part of its efforts to support city-level air pollution control under the Environment Protection Charge (EPC) funds, an RTI reply has revealed. The funds were disbursed to ULBs in Gurugram, Jind, Narnaul, Nuh, Palwal, Greater Noida, Hapur, Bharatpur and Bhiwadi through the respective state pollution control boards (SPCBs), according to the reply provided by the CPCB's air quality management division to an application filed under the Right to Information (RTI) Act on June 17. Additionally, the release of Rs 18.56 crore for seven other cities in the National Capital Region (NCR) -- Bahadurgarh, Bhiwani, Charkhi Dadri, Daruhera, Karnal, Panipat and Sonipat -- is currently under process through the Haryana State Pollution Control Board (HSPCB), the reply said. The funds are meant to serve as gap-funding support for implementing the city action plans for ...
A red alert was issued for Delhi as it remained in the grip of an intense heatwave, with temperatures ranging from 40.9 to 45.0 degrees Celsius across various weather stations on Wednesday. The heat index, a measure of how hot it feels when humidity is factored in, touched an alarming 51.9 degrees Celsius. At 5.30 pm, Ayanagar was the hottest at 45 degrees Celsius, followed by Palam at 44.5 degrees Celsius, Ridge at 43.6 degrees Celsius, Pitampura at 43.5 degrees Celsius, Lodi Road at 43.4 degrees Celsius, Mayur Vihar at 40.9 degrees Celsius and Safdarjung --the city's base station -- reported 43.3 degrees Celsius. On the heat index crossing 50, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) said it depends on temperature and relative humidity and varies throughout the day based on changes in these values. Additionally, the heat index is not validated for Indian conditions, and no official records of it are maintained. Heatwave conditions have been observed in Delhi and at isolated plac
A new report by the Central Pollution Control Board submitted to the National Green Tribunal has said that as per statistical analysis, the water quality during the recently-concluded Maha Kumbh in Prayagraj was fit for bathing. The Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) report said the statistical analysis was necessitated because of "variability of data" in the samples collected from the same locations across different dates and on different locations on the same day, because of which these did not reflect the "overall river water quality throughout the river stretch". The report dated February 28 and uploaded on the tribunal's website on March 7 said the board had conducted water monitoring twice a week from January 12 onwards, including on auspicious bathing days, at five locations on Ganga river and two locations on Yamuna river. "There is a significant variability in the values on various parameters, viz pH, dissolved oxygen (DO), biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) and fecal ...