States losing battle against pollution?

Aug 22, 2011 - Rashme Sehgal |

Age Correspondent

A beach in Thiruvananthapuram has turned reddish-brown with the Kerala state pollution control board admitting that 6,000 tones of sulphuric acid and ferrous sulphate are being dumped into the waters everyday.
Villagers in Gujarat are up in arms against the Gujarat pollution control board for its failure to check the pollution caused by a cement factory in Junagadh district.
Repeated complaints against the pollution caused by a copper smelting unit in Tuticorn in 2010 led the Supreme Court to ask National Environmental Engin-eering Research Institute (NEERI) to investigate the matter. NEERI confirmed that heavy metal contamination was much beyond the prescribed limits laid down by the Central pollution control board.
Complaints against the non-functioning of the state control pollution boards are pilling up with the ministry of environment & forests (MoEF) but the ministry’s bureaucrats insist pollution is a state subject and it is upto the state pollution boards (SPB) to control it.
The Centre for Science & Environment (CSE) which has been closely monitoring the functioning of some of SPBs believes that the pollution monitoring by many of the state boards leaves much to be desired.
Chandra Bhushan, executive director, CSE, cites the example of how MoEF allowed the highly polluted city of Vapi to go ahead with industrial expansion. When CSE conducted their own laboratory tests, they found the ground water levels and the river Daman Ganga contained high levels of heavy metals.

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