Poor AQI: Set up monitoring systems, NCR industries told

To curb air pollution in the National Capital Region (NCR), the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) has directed the Member Secretary, State Pollution Control Board, and Pollution Control Committee (PCC) of four states — Delhi, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan to ensure installation of Pan, Tilt and Zoom (PTZ) cameras and real-time online continuous effluent/emission monitoring systems (OCEMS) on boilers of textile, food and metal industries in the NCR districts before December 31.

The air quality index in the national capital and in the NCR districts has been poor for the past many days.

Tightening the noose on pollution norms’ violators, the CPCB had directed the state pollution control boards (SPCBs) and pollution control committees (PCCs) in the NCR (Haryana, Rajasthan, UP and Delhi) to ensure closure of all medium and large-scale industries under red category, which have not installed and connected online stack emission monitoring systems in 2019.

The CPCB has recently collected details of air polluting industries in the NCR from SPCBs and PCC, in which 2,361 units were found in three polluting sectors — food and food processing, textile and metal processing units.

After this, the CPCB carried out the verification of industrial units and found that only 351 units have the OCEMS and are connected with the CPCB server. It was also found that 2010 industrial units of these three sectors have not installed and connected the OCEMS with the CPCB server so far.

Taking a stringent note over it and considering the poor air quality in the NCR, the CPCB has directed the Member Secretaries of the SPCBs to ensure the installation of the real-time OCEMS and PTZ cameras on the boilers of the industrial units of three prominent pollution categories to curb air pollution in NCR.

The CPCB in its directions said that OCEMS should be installed for monitoring the particulate matter (PM) parameter in the boilers of textile, food and food processing industries. PTZ cameras should be installed as per the standard operating procedure.

The CPCB further said in its directions that in the case of metal industries, OCEMS should be installed for monitoring parameters -– PM, SO2, and NOx — in all furnaces using met-cock, LSHS/Ultra or very low sulphur oil as fuel.