Ghaziabad: Pollution level in the city area has been consistently high over the past few days with all four local monitoring stations recording “very poor” air for most of the days. The AQI recorded at Sanjay Nagar monitoring station has been above the 325 mark been for the entire week. Loni had the most number of “severe” air days in the week(three days) and Vasundhara had the cleanest air of the four stations.
“The old Ghaziabad city has congested roads and there are also a couple of industrial belts, so vehicular pollution, road dust and unpaved roads collectively contribute to the overall situation,” Vikrant Sharma, a city-based environmentalist, said while talking about pollution in Sanjay Nagar.
Bulandshahr Road Industrial Area, which is in the old city, has 60 polluting industries, identified by the Uttar Pradesh Pollution Control Board (UPPCB). “Of the 297 air polluting industries identified by the UPPCB in the district, 60 are in Bulandshahr Road Industrial Area and most have furnaces, which despite claims by department, uses cheap fuel, like burnt diesel, husk and coal that push PM10 and PM2.5 levels,” Sharma said. “As per the district administration’s own admission, there are at least seven vehicular pollution road junctions in the area of the total 17 identified,” Sharma added. “For the traffic department, it is relatively easy to crackdown on polluting vehicles in other parts of the city but in old Ghaziabad, most roads are narrow and they are difficult to monitor.”
On October 2, the Ghaziabad Municipal Corporation had introduced the concept of collecting road dust and since then, has collected and disposed of more than 26,000 kg of dust in city area. “We had introduced a concept of collecting dust particles from city’s roads in specially designed bags since October 2. We had 4,375 bags,” said Mahendra Singh Tawar, municipal commissioner. “It is worth noting that 26,000 kg road dust has been collected in 27 days. It is enough to give an idea of the pollution level.