Kochi: The state pollution control board may be ready to formally launch its river monitoring station at Eloor on January 5, but environmentalists and local residents are far from enthusiastic about it, charging that it has not been scientifically designed.
While the station, fitted with advanced and sensitive equipment for checking river water and air quality, has already started functioning and its results are being flashed on a big display board installed at the traffic island of FACT junction, activists of Periyar Malineekarana Virudha Samithi allege its sensors have been placed in areas far away from where the actual pollution is.
“Sensors have been erected downstream of the Periyar, some 2.5 kms from the industrial discharge point. So the figures displayed on the board cannot be accurate. There is a similar problem with the air monitoring station set up in front of ESI Hospital in Pathalam. Even when there is an unbearable odour of ammonia in the air, the display board continues to give figures that place the release within safe limits,” says Purushan Eloor of the samithi, which now plans to launch protests against the ‘unscientific’ installation of the monitoring stations.
The pollution control board which had announced the launch of its river monitoring station in 2011, says it can help it detect variations in levels of chloride, phosphate, free ammonia, suspended particles, salinity and temperature besides other general parameters in the air and water.
