By TIOL News Services

NEW DELHI, SEPT 21, 2014: DR Harsh Vardhan, Union Health Minister, has stressed the need for enforcing statutory standards prescribed by the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) and directives issues by the Supreme Court to prevent noise pollution. Globally, noise has emerged as the single biggest cause of disability in the workplace.

“Successive governments have skirted the real issue by addressing the noise menace as just another nuisance. Our delaying of a specific legislation is part of a larger mistake of not providing for adequate environmental safeguards before embarking on rapid industrialisation,” the Minister said while inaugurating the 13th annual conference of the Association of Otolaryngologists of India (AOI), Kerala branch, in Perinthalmana in north Kerala today. Health Minister, Kerala, Shri V. S. Sivakumar was also present during the function. More than 700 specialists attended the event.

Describing noise pollution as a “modern plague”, Dr Harsh Vardhan lauded Kerala chapter of AOI for being at the forefront of the National Initiative for Safe Sound (NISS).

“It is a welcome development to see ear-nose-throat (ENT) specialists like myself ending the “silence” over noise pollution. The high level of awareness among people in the state on the issue is due in the most part to the awareness campaigns undertaken over several years by AOI,” he remarked.

Dr Harsh Vardhan said, “As professionals you encounter daily the effects of noise pollution on patients. I remember in my early years in ENT practice, it was relatively uncommon to have a patient with hearing adverse impact, but in recent years even youngsters have started coming with impairment caused by noise hazard.”

Dr Harsh Vardhan announced that he is in the process of constituting a high-level expert group to recommend standards of acceptability of environmental sound levels. The Ministry would make them the basis of a new legislation, he stated. The only instrument with law enforcers at present, the Noise Pollution (Regulation & Control) Rules, 2000, developed by CPCB is supposed to be enforced by local police units all over India. But there is little public awareness about them, the Health Minister noted.

As Delhi's Health Minister in the early 1990s he had formed the first expert panel on noise pollution which was headed by Dr Santosh Kackar, an ENT specialist who was then professor and head of the Department of Otorhinolaryngology of All India Institute of Medical Sciences.

Another initiative was the setting up of the country's first –and till date only-Department of Environmental and Occupational Health at New Delhi's Maulana Azad Medical College. A concept to set up one such department in each new upcoming AIIMS of the country is now being considered for implementation, the Health Minister said.

Dr Harsh Vardhan remarked that the ill effects of chronic exposure to noise are not visible until at an advanced stage. WHO has come out with the finding that noise pollution can cause headaches, heart ailments, stress related disorders, hypertension and psychological disorders, he informed. Hearing loss is the primary health effect, but the systemic and psychological effects are long-term and can lead to permanent scars.