After failed attempts to check pollution in the vicinity of Taj Mahal, the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) will now chart a "wind profile" of the monument to trace the "source" of pollution, that is robbing the Taj of its milky shine. In its quest to ascertain the wind direction, the CPCB has recently installed a state-of-the-art "real time ambient air quality monitoring system" at the monument to study the wind pattern.

According to experts, the gadget will help the CPCB officials determine if the Mathura oil refinery is the major pollutant, a charge that has long been doing the rounds.

According to CPCB sources, the pollution monitoring station of the board, located at Taj Mahal, has been recently equipped with an automatic Beta-Attenuation Monitoring System with the help of the Environment Department of the Canadian government.

This system, which monitors air pollution in real time, is fitted with the facility of storing pollution data for 20 days on a filter paper tape hermetically sealed inside the monitoring unit and this tape, which is then bombarded with beta radiation from a C14 isotope, produces valuable data on pollution.

The data is tabulated by the department to be uploaded on the Internet for general public.

The system also has the facility of displaying the statistics "in-house" through a large plasma screen and the CPCB has sought permission from the Archaeological Survey of India to install this plasma screen at the entrance of the Taj Mahal for visitors.

Currently, the system, housed in a tower on the Taj premises, is being subjected to a trial run for the past three months since its installation in February this year and has been found to work satisfactorily, albeit with some minor calibration glitches.

Sources say the glitches will be corrected soon, before the system is declared fully functional.

The CPCB station at the Taj, which has been operating since 2001, is already fine-tuned to measure the levels of sulphur di-oxide, nitrous oxide, Suspended Particulate Matter (SPM) & Respirable Suspended Particulate Matter (RSPM), but this new station is capable of capturing valuable data regarding the concentration of Fine Particulate Matter (FPM) measuring 10µm and 2.5 µm around the monument that has been found to cause maximum damage to the monument's surface in recent studies.

But according to CPCB officials, the main advantage of this system is that being hyper-sensitive to the pollutant concentration in the air, it will be helpful in creating a "profile" of the air systems around the Taj, marking the direction from which the maximum pollution is coming as the concentration of pollutants in the wind is largely dependent on industrial activities in the area through which the wind is circulating.

The Taj Mahal is probably the only monument in the country equipped with not one, but two hi-tech pollution monitoring stations, one being run by CPCB at the western side of the monument and the other by the ASI on the northern part of the premises. But there is hardly any correlation between the statistics of the two stations.

The CPCB station will be able to monitor five pollution parameters, apart from the usual weather-related statistics making the data highly valuable for the study of pollution in Agra - notably the role of the Mathura Refinery located barely 50 km north of Agra.

The refinery has been blamed for emitting hydrocarbon pollutants in high concentration, but there has been little data to support this allegation made by industrialists, who had been uprooted from the town following pollution threats to the monument.

With the installation of this new air quality monitoring system, the local industrialists hope that the real cause of this pollution will now be identified as most of the polluting units have now been relocated.