In 'red': Gzb home to nearly 430 highly polluting industrial units

NOIDA: Industrial hub Ghaziabad has 426 units marked in 'red' in the pollution grading index, data released by the state pollution control board on June 15 reveals. Noida, which is more services than manufacturing, has 84 such highly polluting industries while Greater Noida has 110, the data states.

These industries account for the maximum amount of particulate matter -PM 2.5 and 10-ozone, nitrogen dioxide and sulphur dioxide released into the atmosphere. Last year, 300 industries were earmarked in the red category in Ghaziabad and 84 in Noida.
Track the pollution level in your city
The pollution index is a scale of 0 to 100 where the increasing value of PI denotes an increasing degree of pollution load.
The data is released by the PCB annually. It has four categories-red, orange, green and white. Industries that fall under the white category are ones that have adopted cleaner technologies and are non-polluting.
According to the data, Noida has a total of 1,027 registered industrial units, of them 606 are in the orange or poor category and 527 others are ranked green or satisfactory on the pollution index. In Ghaziabad, which has 1,037 industrial units, there are 303 in orange and 308 in green categories, while Greater Noida has 271 in the orange and 1,370 in the green categories of the total 2,200 registered industries.
In 2022, of the total 1,207 industries in Noida, 606 were earmarked orange and 527 green. Ghaziabad, which had 1,900 registered units, had 700 in orange and 900 green categories in the corresponding period.
The data for Greater Noida has remained unchanged from 2022, officials said.
According to pollution department officials, special measures will be adopted to check pollution levels in the respective districts ahead of winter months when the entire NCR is under the grip of extreme pollution. Officials said they were planning to impose a ban on diesel generator sets in the two districts and also conduct checks on the most polluting units every three months.
In Greater Noida, of the 2,200 industries registered, a total of 1,225 use DG sets, UPPCB's regional officer (Greater Noida) Radhe Shyam said. "The Commission for Air Quality Management's (CAQM) direction to ban the use of diesel generator sets for the industrial and commercial sectors in NCR will go a long way to improve the pollution level," he said.
Ghaziabad's UPPCB regional officer Utsav Sharma, meanwhile, said that only captive power plant-based units in the district were using coal currently, while the others were fueled by PNG, biomass or approved fuels. "Diesel gen-sets are used by industries only for backup," he said.
In Noida, too, DG sets are used for backup.
According to Noida's UPPCB regional officer Praveen Kumar of the 84 industries that are listed in the red or highly polluting category, only 21 are "grossly polluting units. All these industries are operating as per prescribed environmental norms and have functional pollutant control devices to measure air and water quality. There are quarterly inspections by a third party to ensure there are no gaps".