April 17: India’s telecom revolution — with over 600 million subscribers — is also resulting in environmental pollution, enough to cause concern sector’s regulator Trai. A new set of recommendations from Trai says that in the next five years, half of the telecom towers in rural areas and one third in the urban areas must be powered by hybrid sources. By 2020, hybrid sources must power all rural towers and half of the urban towers. Hybrid power means running towers with renewable energy sources (mainly solar) and grid power from power plants.
As of now, telecom towers are primarily powered by diesel generators — raising environmental concerns. The telecom sector accounts for about one per cent of the total greenhouse gas emissions in India. “While this figure might appear to be not so significant in absolute terms, the rapid growth of telecommunications envisaged over the next decade calls for an effort to contain and reduce the carbon footprint,” said Trai. There are 5,62,174 mobile towers in the country.
Further, Trai said that by 2015, all mobile phones should be free of brominates and chlorinated compounds and antimony trioxide in accordance with the e-waste (management and handling) Rules 2010, proposed by the ministry of environment and forests to be followed by all telecom manufacturers, as and when notified. The regulator also wants mobile phone makers to ensure proper arrangements for collection of e-waste – mobile phones, batteries, chargers etc. It says that cellphone makers must place bins at appropriate locations to collect e-waste, and it should be safely disposed or recycled as per the prevailing standards.
The telecom regulator has also said that all service providers should declare to it, the carbon footprint of their network operations. Based on the details of footprints declared by all service providers, service providers should aim at carbon emission reduction targets for their mobile networks by 8 per cent by the year 2012-2013, 12 per cent by the year 2014-2015 and 25 per cent by the year 2018-2019.