NEW DELHI, DEC 9. Unable to visit the Taj Mahal due to shortage of time during his three-day stay at Agra, Muhammad Noman Saigal, Adviser to Chief Minister of Sindh and Provincial Minister for Environment and Alternate Energy, will nevertheless have enough to talk about the Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) technology back home in Karachi.
"I have been really impressed by the way vehicular pollution in Delhi has been reduced by shifting over to CNG and sincerely feel that if the technology is adopted in Karachi, air pollution will come down there also,'' Mr. Saigal told The Hindu here today.
Mr. Saigal, who was here to attend the Better Air Quality workshop, organised by the World Bank, the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers and the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests, felt that the causes of air pollution in India and Pakistan were the same and the two countries could share their experiences in overcoming these.
"Of course India is way ahead in controlling pollution and Pakistan can learn a few lessons from,'' he said. `"The purpose of my visit was to learn from the Indian experiences, understand the scenario here and follow these up in Pakistan.'' To begin with, Mr. Saigal has decided to initiate correspondence with the Indian Government which will be followed by exchange of technology and then research in this sector.
Karachi, the capital of Sindh province, is one of the largest metropolitan cities of Pakistan which has the two major ports of the country and several industrial zones that hold 60 per cent of the industries. According to Mr. Saigal, the problem of air pollution has assumed serious dimesnions in Karachi as well as other large urban centres of Pakistan with the major sources of pollution being transport, industries and open burning of solid wastes, which, he feels, need to be monitored and regulated.
Over a million motor vehicles operating in Karachi are largely uncontrolled with respect to air emissions. They include omnibuses and trucks running on diesel fuel, autorickshaws running on two-stroke, cars and other vehicles running on petrol. Autorickhsaws serve as a prominent source of transportation and there are about 25,000 units on the roads of Sindh. ``Though we are using imported, luxury buses but we still need some measures to control emission in the older buses which can be done through the use of CNG,'' Mr. Saigal said.
"Pakistan will still need some time to reach to the level of successfully overcoming pollution to the extent India has done, particularly networking through the Metro rail system,'' he said. As of now, the Government has decided to ask the industries to adopt self-monitoring pollution measures under which the industry will be responsible to have the samples of their emission or effluents analyse through a laboratory, duly certified by the Government.
