At 11:34 am on Monday,one among numerous CCTV feeds on a large LCD screen at the Gujarat Pollution Control Boards regional office in Ahmedabad showed heavy,dark-grey smoke billowing from a smoke stack. A young student intern zoomed in and immediately dialled a cellphone number. After a short conversation,she turned to regional officer A A Dolti and said,Sir,the factory owner,he is in Mumbai. Dolti took the phone and said,This is Dolti. We are seeing unusual smoke from your stack. Please ask your manager to check. In the face of manpower shortage,logistics problems and increasing pressure to make a heavily industrialised state less toxic,the GPCB is experimenting with a bank of CCTV cameras trained on smoke stacks of industrial units,monitored by a group of post-graduate students of environmental sciences who are interning at the boards office in Ahmedabad. In the Narol industrial area near Ahmedabad,57 CCTVs are trained on 89 stacks. Three more keep an eye on stacks of three textile factories inside the city. In Vatva,another industrial cluster on the citys outskirts,14 CCTVs have been installed although they are yet to start functioning due to insufficient Internet connectivity. The board began work on the pilot project about five months ago but real monitoring began on April 6. GPCBs member-secretary Hardik Shah said the board plans to extend the project in Surat. Ironically,the idea came from an industrial unit. Dolti was in the office of Hemline Textiles owner where he saw a screen flickering with CCTV feeds of various areas in the factory. Dolti asked if the stack was being monitored and the owner got his engineers to put up a camera. Days later,the owner called Dolti to say the live-feed not just monitored smoke levels,it also made it possible for him to indirectly monitor fuel usage and increase efficiency. According to Meenakshi Rathod,deputy engineer in-charge of Narol,air pollution is the largest problem at textile clusters,of which particulate matter forms the largest component. Though CCTV monitoring is of limited use since it functions only during daylight hours and does not measure pollution levels,it does seem to be forcing factory owners into compliance. Less than five minutes after Dolti spoke to the owner of the factory from where smoke was billowing Monday morning,the owner called back to say they were fixing the problem even as the intern monitored progress real-time on the LCD screen. The GPCB has just 200-odd officials to monitor more than 51,000 smoke stacks across the state. Currently,three interns work for the Ahmedabad regional office while two others have just finished their internship at the boards Gandhinagar headquarters.
