IF you are concerned about losing the battle against pollution, there's all the more reason to worry. The Central Pollution Control Board (cpcb), the national apex body, can hardly be called a regulator for tackling environmental degradation. In fact, it is "near-defunct". This extraordinary conclusion comes from a report presented to Parliament last week by the parliamentary standing committee on science & technology, environment & forests. Crippled by lack of technical and legal staff, and with its powers whittled away, cpcb has had no regular chairman for the last two years. The post is presently occupied by a bureaucrat from the Union ministry of environment & forests (moef) although the board is supposed to be autonomous. If all powers and functions of the board are to remain with moef, the report says, the need to have an apex body like cpcb is "untenable." "It's shameful that in a country of 1.2 billion people, the moef has not found a competent person to head the cpcb," says Claude Alvares of the Goa Foundation and member of the Supreme Court Monitoring Committee on Hazardous Waste. "This seems part of the larger trend of dismantling the environmental regulatory machinery. It's illegal for the cpcb to have a part-time chairman because laws to protect the air and water do not permit it." Currently, the criteria for a chairperson are too general and vague. The parliamentary report calls for exacting standards for chairpersons and goes on to state that 77 per cent of chairpersons and 55 per cent of member-secretaries in state pollution control boards are not qualified for their posts. The report also criticises the practice of having parallel boards at the Centre and the states. While the former has a advisory and a coordinating role, it is the state boards that have the power to ensure compliance in the states. The report makes the case for putting pollution on the concurrent list, making it possible for both the Centre and the states to take action. The extent of shortage of technical expertise in pollution control boards is revealed in a recent study by the Delhi-based Centre for Science & Environment (cse). It found that on average a technical staff member of the state pcb spares just 1.77 days to monitor an industrial unit each year in Gujarat, 1.72 days in Karnataka and 1.23 days in Maharashtra. Similarly, the lack of legal experts has made it extremely difficult to prosecute polluters. "Pollution control boards have stopped filing cases against polluters and as a result they are going scot-free. There is no credible deterrent for noncompliance when it comes to lawsj meant to check pollution," says Chandra/ Bhushan, associate director of cse. The lack of technical expertise also means that data gathered by cpcb is often not even analysed. "For instance, there have been qualitative statements about cng improving the environment in Delhi but there has been no quantitative data analysis to back that," points out Mukesh Khare, professor of environmental engineering at iit Delhi. The use of so-called green fuels such as cng and lpg produces nitrogen oxides that are known to cause respiratory problems and acid rain. Then there is the growing problem of heavy metal pollution, "cpcb needs to evolve to keep itself abreast of the latest changes in the environment and accordingly safeguard human and environmental health. For example it hasn't set standards for heavy metal pollutants in irrigation water, which end up in the food we consume," says Satish Sinha, associate director of Toxics Link, a Delhi-based environmental ngo. THE parliamentary panel report also points out that sewage treatment plants exist only in 92 of the 423 Class I cities and in 37 of the 498 Class II cities. The report has also called for an increase in the number of pollution monitoring stations from 332 to 1,000 in the next five years. While not answering questions on the severe shortage of skilled manpower or the poor legal pursuit of polluters, J.M. Mauskar, the cpcb chairman who's also an additional secretary with moef, said in a faxed reply that the board "has been doing its best to address the complex issues related to abatement of pollution." The indictment of cpcb comes at a time when India is increasingly becoming a dumping ground for hazardous waste from across the world and needs a swift and effective pollution control mechanism. Last month, authorities at the Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust, Mumbai, intercepted a consignment of 90,000 litres of waste oil being illegally imported from Yemen, said Alvares. Across the world, waste oil has to be reprocessed before reuse as it contains toxic levels of chromium, arsenic, cadmium and lead. Because reprocessing can be expensive, waste oil, which is cheap, is often illegally exported to developing countries like India for use in adulterating oil. According to a 2003 Supreme Court ruling, cpcb was to take over control and management of hazardous waste, especially at ports. "But till today the ports do not have the expertise to recognise the waste that comes in regularly. It is just up to the customs officials, who neither have the knowledge nor the technology to identify them," says Alvares. In a month, cse is slated to release a report on the state of environment regulators in the country. Concludes Bhushan: "What we are calling for is a complete overhaul of the boards and giving them the administrative and financial autonomy that they don't have presently. The way they are structured has made them incapable of handling the kind of pollution we face today." Is the government listening? ?