HYDERABAD: Residents of Nallagandla have been raising a stink over strong chemical smells emanating from the neighbouring Bachupally area, which increase further during the night.
While a complaint has been lodged with the Telangana State Pollution Control Board (TSPCB), residents are clueless about the source of the pungent odour. They even raised the issue with the Telangana State Pollution Control Appellate Authority (TSPCAA) earlier this year.
In the last few days, residents were put to severe hardship with the smell enveloping the area from 10 pm onwards and spreading across Bachupally, Nallagandla and even some parts of financial district.
While TSPCAA issued orders to Environment Protection Training and Research Institute and TSPCB to conduct studies to trace the source of the smell, residents continue to experience awful smells.
“There are some chemical factories in Bachupally and it’s clearly coming from there. The smell is increasing rapidly during the night and we suspect the factories are releasing these toxic gases,” said Gyan Prakash, a chemical engineer with Dr Reddy’s and a local resident of Hill County.Interestingly, the residents, many of whom have a chemical engineering background and are employees with pharmaceutical companies, have created their own neighbourhood WhatsApp group ‘FIT TO QUIT POLLUTION’ to study the issue, which has persisted for almost 10 years.
“I personally filed more than 100 complaints with TSPCB, but nothing came out of it. It is sometimes unbearable to step out as the odour is too strong. The smell is not uniform always — sometimes it smells like ammonia. It also smells like aldehyde and other times it’s like a solvent,” Roshan Miranda, founder of Bintix Waste Research and a resident of Bachupally, told TOI.
TSPCB officials said timing of the smell doesn’t have a steady pattern, making it difficult to get a proper volatile organic compound reading. “We have conducted tests hundreds of times in the area whenever we received a complaint. But several factors, including the wind direction and timing of the gases being released, are making it difficult to ascertain,” an environmental engineer with the TSPCB told TOI.
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