Canada conscious of pollution damage to Taj

VIJAY UPADHYAY
AGRA. Besides being the tourism icon of India, the Taj Mahal is also on the prime focus of the world’s environmental agencies for the structural damage being caused to this world heritage monument by air-borne pollution.
In continuation to its support to the Central Pollution Control Board of India on pollution control, the Environment Ministry of Canada sent its deputy minister to Agra on Saturday to hold meeting with the CPCB officials regarding the effect of Suspended Particulate Matter on the Taj Mahal and on the environment of Agra as a whole.
Talking to The Pioneer, Dr. Dipankar Saha, the local official of CPCB in Agra said that the Canadian delegation, led by Samy Watson, Deputy Minister and David Brackett, Director General Environment Canada, visited the CPCB’s installation at the Taj Mahal on Saturday and discussed the possibilities of Indo-Canadian cooperation in the field of the study and control of air-borne pollution in India, especially Agra, being the home of the Taj Mahal.
He said that during the meeting, the Indian delegation, led by B. Sengupta, Member Secretary CPCB, Sanjay Prasad, District Magistrate Agra and D. Dayalan, Superintending Archaeologist, Archaeological Survey of India, Agra conferred with the Canadian officials on the various avenues of mutual support in the field of pollution control, especially the pollution caused by volatile organic compounds like benzene, nitro-compounds and sulphurous gases and their effect on the Taj Mahal.
According to Mr. Saha, the Canadian Environment Ministry had been cooperating with the CPCB for quite some time and recently, it had donated a state-of-the-art Automatic Beta-Attenuation Real Time Ambient Air Quality Monitoring System to be installed at the Taj that, at present, was not only measuring the levels of various pollutants near the monument, but also helping in preparing a profile of the wind systems operating around the monument, recording the concentration of Fine Particulate Matter (FPM) of size 10µm and 2.5 µm in the air of the city. Besides, he said, the system also had the facility of displaying the pollution statistics “in-house” through a large plasma screen and it was configured to upload the pollution data in real time to the CPCB database from where, it could be viewed worldwide through the Internet.
Notably, the Taj Mahal is probably the only monument in the country that is equipped with not one, but two hi-tech pollution monitoring stations, one being run by the CPCB at the western side of the monument and the second one by the Archaeological Survey of India in the northern extreme of the premises with hardly any correlation between the statistics of the two stations. While the ASI run station monitors the variations in only three parameters in the air, with the installation of this Canadian system, the CPCB station is able to reliably monitor five pollution parameters apart from the usual weather related statistics making the data highly valuable for the study of pollution in Agra.
(UNITED NEWS NETWORK)
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