Monitoring of factory waste to go online

NEW DELHI: After launching online green clearance systems for industrial and infrastructure projects, the government is now keen to kick-start a similar system to strictly monitor treatment of industrial waste - both effluents and emissions - by March 31 next year.

The idea is to reduce human intervention and bring transparency in the process of monitoring which has, so far, failed to stop discharge of untreated industrial waste into various rivers across the country.

Under the new system, the industries are required to install "continuous effluent and emission monitoring devices" at their ends (discharge outlets).

The sensor-based devices would be linked online with State Pollution Control Boards (SPCBs) offices in state capitals and with the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) headquarters in Delhi. It will allow the central pollution watchdog to monitor the discharges from the industries on real-time basis.

The time-frame to set up the 'online monitoring system' was discussed in a meeting between water resources and river development minister Uma Bharti and environment minister Prakash Javadekar on Thursday.

Javadekar is learnt to have told Bharti that his ministry was working on launching this system within six months which will go a long way in not only stopping discharge of untreated industrial wastes into Ganga but also in other rivers across the country.

"The SPCBs have already been asked to issue directions to all 17 categories of highly polluting industries to not only install online effluent quality monitoring software and hardware but also upload it with emission and effluent monitoring data in a time bound manner so that the new system can be launched latest by March 31, 2015", said an official who attended the meeting.

He said the online system would end the existing inspection mechanism which had been abused by many polluting industries in collusion with inspectors in the past.

It will be the third initiative of the environment ministry on the digital platform. The ministry had earlier launched the online system for 'environment clearance' in June and a similar system for 'forest clearance' in July to speed up green approval mechanism.

Since delay in handling such clearances had been cited by industries as major hurdle before economic activities under the UPA government, the new government had launched the online system to deal with green clearances issues on priority to boost growth, sending a positive signal to industries.

The meeting between Javadekar and Bharti was held to discuss coordination between the two ministries before finalising the blue-print of the government's Ganga rejuvenation plan.

Both of them also decided to hold meetings with the representatives of various industries on the banks of river Ganga to prevent the flow of industrial waste into the river.