Violation of the ban will invite punitive action, including a fine or a jail term or both, detailed under Section 15 of the Environment Protection Act (EPA) and under bylaws of respective municipal corporations, they said. For effective enforcement of the ban, national and state-level control rooms have been set up and special enforcement teams formed to check illegal manufacture, import, stocking, distribution, sale and use of banned SUP items, officials in the ministry said.
The Ministry of Environment and Forests is setting up a network for national-level monitoring and reporting of noise pollution. Based on the pattern of existing air and water networks, the setting up of the National Ambient Noise Monitoring Network and development of infrastructure for noise mapping in the country are expected to be in place within five years.
The air quality in the national capital remained poor for the sixth consecutive day on Monday with stubble burning accounting for seven per cent of the capital's PM2.5 pollution.
The companies will have to secure a minimum of 400 points out of 1,000 to be able to participate in the rating system.
The ban on certain single-use plastic (SUP) items kicks in from Friday, with state governments initiating an enforcement campaign to identify and close down units engaging in production, distribution, stocking and sale of such items, officials said. Though several manufacturers have said they are not prepared to implement the ban due to a lack of alternatives, Union Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav had on Tuesday said the government had given enough time to the industry and the general public to prepare for the ban on SUP items and it hopes for everyone's cooperation in implementing it from July 1. Violation of the ban will invite punitive action, including a fine or a jail term or both, detailed under Section 15 of the Environment Protection Act (EPA) and under bylaws of respective municipal corporations, officials in the Union environment ministry said.
The Central Pollution Control Board has asked Tata Steel to submit the closure schedule of the battery at the earliest, minister of state for Steel A Sai Prathap said in a written reply to a question in the Lok Sabha. Coke oven battery is a plant where coking coal is converted into coke.
According to Central Pollution Control Board's (CPCB) Sameer app, the city's air quality index (AQI) stood at 449 in the severe category at 8 am on Saturday. It was 462 on Friday.
Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal announced that primary schools will be closed from Saturday in view of spike in pollution levels in the national capital.
According to forecasting agencies, the city is set to record its best air quality for the day after Diwali since 2015 on Tuesday.
The government asserted that the Central Pollution Control Board will inspect the ship
The Kerala State Pollution Control Board has ordered closure of soft drinks major Coca Cola's plant at Plachimada in Palakkad district.
The Madras high court on Tuesday rejected a plea from mining giant Vedanta to order reopening of its Sterlite copper unit at Tuticorin in Tamil Nadu.
India captain Rohit Sharma assured BCCI boss Sourav Ganguly that his team is ready to play Sunday's opening T20 International against Bangladesh despite growing concerns about severe air pollution.
This comes at a time when the group's copper plant in Tamil Nadu remains shut for nearly three years, causing a Rs 5 crore loss every day.
Better living conditions must be an integral part of all political campaigns. But this will only happen if the public pressures the political class to understand the irreversibility of climate change and make the environment a crucial part of their manifestos.
In India, air pollution is most severe in the Indo-Gangetic Plain (northern India), where topography and meteorology concentrate pollution from energy, mobility, industry, agriculture, and other activities, the researchers said.
According to the Central Pollution Control Board's mobile application SAMEER, the city recorded an air quality index of 168, which falls in the 'moderate' category, much better than Monday's AQI of 221, which falls in the 'poor' category.
DLF's upcoming project Mall of India in Noida, projected to be one of the largest in the country, has been served a notice to stop all construction activities till a clearance from the National Board for Wildlife is obtained.
Earth just cannot support seven billion human beings! Find out how you can use science, social awareness and data analytics to come up with sustainable solutions.
A government release also urged people of the state to burst crackers with low decibel and pollution levels.
The top court said a balanced approach of sustainable development ensuring environmental safeguards needs to be resorted to while dealing with the issue of sand mining.
Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal inaugurated the 'country's first smog tower' at Connaught Place in New Delhi on Monday and said it will prove to be a milestone and many such structures can be installed in the city if the pilot project yields results.
The eight areas that recorded 'severe' air quality Saturday are Anand Vihar, Dwarka Sector 8, Narela, Punjabi Bagh, Bawana, Mundaka, Vivek Vihar and Rohini.
Housing Minister M T B Nagaraj and K Sudhakar handed over their resignations at the Speaker's chamber in Vidhana Soudha.
Water is drawn for agriculture, industry and cities, but only waste is returned to the river.
The Maharashtra Pollution Control Board has scheduled the hearing on January 15.
The city also recorded a maximum temperature of 23.8 degrees Celsius, 16 notches below normal and the lowest in the month of May since 1951, the IMD said.
The survey was conducted in 88 major industrial clusters in the country.
The Goa government has constituted several teams to inspect and quantify the iron ore stacked at various points in the state before allowing it to be exported, a senior official said on Wednesday.
A PIL was filed stating the extensive wedding preparations of Suryakant -- son of Ajay Gupta -- and that of Atul Gupta's son Shashank was damaging the environment.
Delhi will become the first such city in India to have such a scheme and the only one after Beijing in Asia.
Residents of south Delhi's Okhla area were delighted to see what they thought was the season's first snowfall. But they were enraged after realising that it was toxic ash from a large waste-to-energy plant operated by Jindal Ecopolis in the neighbourhood.
Skies over Delhi hung heavy with smoke and its air quality inched towards "severe" category on Diwali night as people burst firecrackers in a blatant disregard to the government's ban against it, imposed amid an increase in the contribution from farm fires.
Smelter produces more than 300,000 tonnes a year to supply half of India's domestic copper needs.
According to the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB), the 24-hour average concentration of lung-damaging fine particles known as PM2.5 in Delhi-NCR shot up from 243 micrograms per cubic metre at 6 pm on Thursday (Diwali day) to 410 micrograms per cubic metre at 9 am on Friday, around seven times the safe limit of 60 micrograms per cubic metre.
The eight critically polluted areas are Ludhiana (Punjab), Varanasi-Mirzapur (Uttar Pradesh), Agra (Uttar Pradesh), Bhavnagar (Gujarat), Cuddalore (Tamil Nadu), Dombivalli (Maharashtra), Aurangabad (Maharashtra) and Navi-Mumbai (Maharashtra).
The green panel said that innocent people drank and bathed in the river with reverence, without knowing that it may adversely affect their health.
The Centre on Monday earmarked a separate Rs 2,217 crore for 42 urban centres to tackle air pollution and announced the much-awaited voluntary vehicle scrapping policy to phase out old and polluting vehicles, even as it shrunk the budgetary allocation for the environment ministry from the last fiscal by nearly eight percent. Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, in her budget speech for 2021-22, announced a total of Rs 2869.93 crore for the ministry, Rs 230 crore less than the last fiscal. Officials said the outlay has been lesser this time as the economy is recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Tribunal sought response from the Maharashtra government and the state pollution control board asking whether any standards have been laid down regarding noise pollution and what steps are taken against use of sirens in "silence zones".
© 2026 Rediff.com - Investor Information - Advertise with us - Disclaimer - Privacy Policy - Sitemap - Feedback - About us - Terms of use - Grievances