Tata Steel and Maithon Power — a joint venture between the Tata Group and DVC — have voluntarily opted for pollution assessments on their plant premises in Jamshedpur and Maithon, Dhanbad, walking the talk on Wednesday, World Environment Day.

These two companies were the first to opt for this 24/7 monitoring on the day Jharkhand State Pollution Control Board (JSPCB) launched the star rating programme (SRP) to assess industrial pollution across all categories, board chairman A.K. Rastogi said in Ranchi.

Under this first-of-its-kind green transparency initiative in Jharkhand, the least compliant industrial unit will get one star, and the most compliant, five stars.

For one year till June 5, 2020, industries have to volunteer to get their pollution levels in their plants assessed. Thereafter it would become mandatory, JSPCB chairman A.K. Rastogi told the audience at the World Environment Day event at forest department headquarters’ Palash Auditorium in Doranda.

He added: “Experts from the India team of Energy Policy Institute of the University of Chicago (EPIC-India) will help us assess the pollution level of industries. We (the JSPCB) signed an MoU with EPIC-India in Ranchi on March 1 this year. Through the rating system, we want to increase data transparency and limit dangerous particulate material pollution at 17 categories of highly pollutant industries, including rolling mills and big stone crushers.”

The World Health Organisation says particulate matter pollution, caused by the burning of fossil fuels and industrial activities, should be limited to 10 microgram per cubic metre. But, it is much higher in this country.

Just as an instance, on World Environment Day, Ranchi clocked 53 at 3.40pm, not even peak time for traffic.

A pollution control board source said that for now, they were focusing on particulate matter, but they soon would widen the ambit to monitor the emission of toxic gases too.

On how Tata Steel and Maithon Power would get their pollution levels assessed, pollution control board member secretary Rajiv Lochan Bakshi said both had installed stack analysers to monitor particulate matter and send the collected data online continuously to the board.

I.S. Chaturvedi, additional chief secretary in charge of the forest department, said he hoped that with the star rating in place, industrial units that were not fully compliant would put in effort to be so.

Contacted for comment, well-known Ranchi-based environmentalist Nitish Priyadarshi welcomed the government’s step of monitoring industrial pollution.

“Mining areas as a whole, particularly towns such as Dhanbad and Jharia, industrial belts such as Jamshedpur, Bokaro and Ramgarh, and also Pakur and Sahebganj, where a large number of crushers function, have polluted air. Steps to monitor and control rising pollution were long overdue. Great that it’s now been taken up on an official level,” he said.

Not only cities, even villages in Jharkhand have high air pollution, warned Sanjay Kumar, the state’s principal chief conservator of forests.

“With about 97 per cent of our rural population using biomass as cooking fuel, it’s a vicious cycle,” he said.

“We must work smart and hard to get out of this,” he admitted.