The Environment Protection Agency (EPA) is running without a stack emission testing facility and has to pay Rs 18,000 for one such test privately, so the authorities avoid this emission test, putting the citizens’ health at risk. Stack emission testing facility is meant to determine concentration and or emission rate of a particular pollutant or a group of compounds like poisonous gases. An official in the EPA told Pakistan Today on condition of anonymity, “We received many complaints from a housing society of B-17 Sector on GT Road about emission of poisonous gases from six brick kilns near the society, causing air pollution.
We sent our monitoring team there and monitored the visible pollution like smoke only as we have no stack emission testing facility to check the particles or level of poisonous gases.” He said that their monitoring team had checked the visible pollution which was quite low at that time, but it increased when the brick kilns were fuelled. “We will now report to DG Asif Shuja. If he decides that we should opt for stack testing of these brick kilns; we will hire a private company for this job,” he explained. He pointed out, “Stack emission test of a single brick kiln takes a full day and requires drilling which is expensive, so the EPA authorities sometimes ask brick kiln owners to pay the cost of the test and sometimes they pay themselves.” On the other hand, the official website of the EPA is still showing the four-month-old air quality index of Islamabad. There is a big question how the EPA allowed a housing society to start their project when there were six brick kilns around it, which are a serious health threat for the inhabitants. Answering a question, the official said as soon as the housing society compensated the brick kiln owners, they would shift their kilns somewhere else. After the devolution of the Ministry of Environment, the EPA has lost its effective role in controlling pollution as first it was restricted to operation only in Islamabad.
Later, it was placed under the control of the Capital Administration and Development Division (CADD); it once again went under the control of the Ministry of Disaster Management. EPA Director General Asif Shuja was not available for comments.
