Noida sets up committee on environment, DM to head it

NOIDA: The district administration in association with the forest department of Gautam Budh Nagar and the Uttar Pradesh Pollution Control Board (UPPCB) on Thursday floated a special committee to calibrate and follow up all environment related issues in Noida and Greater Noida.

The environment monitoring committee will be chaired by the district magistrate of Gautam Budh Nagar, BN Singh, and will have the district forest officer on the panel. City-based environmentalists Vikrant Tongad and Digvijay Singh Bisht have been appointed as experts on the panel.

“The committee will be meeting every month and look into issues of air and water pollution, waste management and more. We will be following all compliance issues and check the status of NGT complaints. Earlier, we had small committees looking into specific issues but now we will have one umbrella committee. All baseline data and current data will be aggregated by the committee to bring environment related issues under a unified radar,” environmental engineer of the UPPCB, Utsav Sharma, told TOI.
The first initiative by the committee will be to facilitate volunteer enrolment on the Uttar Pradesh Environment Compliance Portal – upecp.in. The UPECB website floated by the state government of UP for environmental causes will henceforth host all problems in the district.

“We are going to start enrolling environment volunteers through the UPECB website and then after engage these citizens for flagging environment issues in the district and then engage them to help resolve some local problems as well. We have taken local experts on board for knowledge sharing. This is a proactive way of resolving environmental problems at micro-level. Each month there will be meetings of the committee and highlight be uploaded on the compliance website,” Utsav Sharma said.

In Noida Greater Noida, environmental issues usually get flagged by local residents on matter of dust pollution and other issues. Here on the entire process of getting environmental issues address would be conducted seamlessly through the committee. “We have actively started working on the issue and we will be able to start the process within July,” Sharma said.

Source : The Times of India