HAZARDOUS RADIATION CITIES

By M H Ahssan

After the alarming story of Delhi and Mumbai, this week we checked 50 spots each in Bengaluru and Chennai for EMR radiation. The readings were depressingly similar. HNN tracks the southern story.

Bengaluru, the epicentre of India’s IT revolution and a city often held as a benchmark for standards of living, faces a serious hazard: it is living inside an insidious electromagnetic radiation (EMR) cloud.

HNN EMR surveys have triggered a massive nation-wide campaign. Both government and media have swung into action

The HNN EMR survey of 100 spots across Delhi was the first of its size in an Indian metro. It followed this with an exhaustive one in Mumbai. The finds only got more alarming. If close to four fifths of Delhi was living in unsafe radiation zones, over nine-tenths of Mumbai was doing so too. The one fifth of Delhi which lived and worked in safe zones was almost entirely in VVIP areas. This was not true of Mumbai. Here film stars and common folk were all equally affected.

The Impact Television channels like Headlines Today and Star News partnered HNN in broadcasting the findings. Alarmed citizens across the country wrote in to HNN asking for surveys in their towns — ranging from Chandigarh to Guwahati and Lucknow to Hyderabad. In Delhi, Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit said she had requested the Delhi High Court to step in; the High Court ordered setting up a high-level committee to look into the health hazards of cell tower violations. Predictably, the industry has obtained a stay on the order. But the Delhi government has also ordered its own survey on cell towers. In Mumbai, Maharashtra CM Ashok Chavan directed top bureaucrats to look into the HNN survey findings. Meanwhile, angry consumers continue to pour letters in.

EMR Solutions conducted this survey with HNN to ascertain the levels of electromagnetic radiation in Indian cities. We tried to have a mix of localities, and to cover market places, residential areas, office spaces, schools, hospitals etc, but these locations were picked randomly and no specific locality, area or installation was targeted.

We have tried to match the procedure of this survey as closely as possible to the procedure of audit recommended by the Telecom Engineering Commission (TEC). The equipment used too is of established brands, meeting specifications recommended by TEC.

The observations/ findings of the survey are mostly about non-conformity of ICNIRP Guidelines, Government Of Delhi Guidelines and other established procedures elsewhere in the world about installation of cell towers.

The survey has not been limited to checking radiation levels but has covered various other violations committed while installing a mobile tower such as the height of the tower, number of antenna, usage of the premises other than the cell tower etc. The findings have been extremely fair and we have ensured a validation process by taking measurements using two different equipments and taking readings at similar times on various days before and after the shared results to ensure consistency in the results.

Even though we have taken the readings using a Spectrum Analyzer which captures the EMR emitted at each frequency in operation at a spot we have not shared this information since the purpose of the survey was NOT to identify and pin-point particular operators.

Also, the purpose of the survey is not to scare people but to generate awareness. We have shared measurements taken at safe localities as well as those that have displayed ‘extreme anomaly’, with no attempt to skew the findings.

At no point has the HNN survey suggested that mobile telephony per se is dangerous. Instead, the survey has sought to draw attention to violations that make a good thing dangerous.

Disturbing as that may be, it’s not the most worrying part. As you would expect, the intensity of radiation from a cell tower drops sharply the further you go away from it. But in many spots in Yelahanka where we took measurements, the closest cell tower was some distance away. And yet, the analyser showed the same level you get when you hold it right up to an antenna. This means that the proliferation of cell towers has reached such levels in Yelahanka that it makes no difference how far you live from one.

Off the airport road, the HNN team found a small residential colony called Vinayak Nagar nestled among seven large cell towers. It drenched the local Ideal City hospital in 4000+ radiation levels. Most callously, there was one on the sports field of the local school. The guidelines forbid the erection of cell towers on school buildings, the logic being that a pre-adolescent’s skull is especially vulnerable to EMR. When asked, Venkataraju, the school’s secretary, said no information on hazards of EMR was provided to the school at the time of installation by the telecom company nor has he seen any warning signs on the towers that now dot the area. After our visit, he called the cell company and was promised a letter stating in writing that there are no health hazards from the tower on the sports field, that has been there for seven years. (In the last year, four new ones have come up in the colony).

Schools in the heart of Bengaluru hardly seem safe either. Of the seven tested for radiation, only one, the Kendriya Vidyalaya in RT Nagar, had acceptable levels of EMR. Bishop Cotton Girls is surrounded by low-lying tower clusters, with one jutting out of the balcony of the nearby night spot, Club Nero. Good Shepherd Nursery School, its vulnerability couched in its name, too was extremely unsafe, with levels over 4,000.

But the story is not one of schools only. EMR in the city seldom comes down to measurable levels. The residential neighbourhood of Mekhri Circle, Cubbon Road, the whole of Infantry Road that houses the police commissioner’s office along with other important government offices, the weekend haunt that is Brigade Road, MG Road, the ironically named IT hub, Electronic City — all clocked above 4000 on the HF analyser.

It was the upper-class, tree-canopied neighbourhoods that regularly turned out to be safe. Union Law Minister Veerappa Moily’s house in RT Nagar, External Affairs Minister SM Krishna’s house in Sadashiv Nagar and Narayana Murthy’s house in Jayanagar were well below any potential threat.

The CM’s office, right behind his official residence, has atop its first floor roof a small cluster of mobile towers, the antennas facing the second floor of the Lalit Hotel barely 100 meters away. The tiny Vinayaka Temple on the footpath at the beginning of MG Road, has a cluster of towers impossibly grafted onto its roof, facing the first floor of almost all the buildings around. But then, the IT city’s electronic excesses are to be expected — its boomtime growth has already taken it far beyond redemption and its salubrious climate became a thing of the past long before the mobile boom.

Bina Ranjan, 32-year-old BPO professional and Chennai resident, is today a nervous woman. Three years ago, she moved into her dream home — a three-bedroom flat on the ninth floor of the plush Ramanayum Abhishek residential complex in Chennai’s Thiruvanmiyur area, with a balcony that overlooks the length of the East Coast Road and the Bay of Bengal. Then, three weeks back, she read TEHELKA’s cover story on Delhi’s EMR menace, and now some of that dream has soured. It’s the view of the other balcony that is causing trouble — three cell towers surround her drawing room, with the furthest one a mere 200 feet away. Having just learnt about the issue, she now wonders if her husband’s recent headaches have anything to do with the towers. The EMR levels in her flat are way above permissible levels.

About 20 km away, in posh Gopalapuram, Mustaq Ahmed, 47-year-old businessman, who has stayed for 10 years in a four-storey apartment building, is also ill at ease, though for a different reason. Radiation levels in his flat are within the safe range, but he worries about the 1400+ levels of EMR affecting the DAV Girls High School opposite his house.

Chennai, the second stop on the southern leg of the HNN EMR survey, does better than Bengaluru, but only just. The city showed a bit more variation than the near constant 4000+ levels found throughout most of North and South Bengaluru but that’s a minor point. Chennai EMR levels are a mixed bag but it has enough of its own 4000+ levels of ‘extreme anomaly’. Nungambakkam residential area and CIT Nagar Nandanam, T Nagar’s jewellery and textile market, large sections of Mount Road, CLRI Kendriya Vidyalaya and a residential colony on Sardar Patel Road in Adyar, are all highly unsafe.

Chennai then also abounds in cell tower violations. While major hospitals like Apollo have been mindful of health hazards, the smaller ones are less careful. Navdeep Laboratory in Chinnamalai has a large cell tower erected right on its terrace while one of the tower clusters is ironically erected on the Hale and Healthy Hospital. Many areas have done away with the three-meter height rule — small tenements overlooking the Apollo Heart Hospital at Thousand Lights have antennae on their balconies, directly aimed at the heart hospital. EMR is particularly hazardous for patients with pacemakers.

Tidel Park, Chennai’s IT landmark, has cell towers aimed at the offices. In fact, this is a prolific violation in the commercial areas of Chennai, where smaller buildings have cell towers directly facing the intermediate floors of taller, adjacent buildings. This would suggest that borderline or unsafe levels measured on the road could easily reach extreme levels if one were to repeat the measurements on upper floors. This is what was observed in Bina’s case — the street level radiation was a few thousand points lower than the 4000+ levels in her ninth floor flat.

In this city too, the posh neighbourhoods are better off. Poes Garden, where Rajnikanth and J Jayalalithaa live, is very safe, barely registering on the analyser, although Chief Minister M Karunanidhi’s house was unsafe at 1100 mW/msq.

Mustaq thinks the “powerful are hand-in- glove with the telecom companies” and the only way anything is going to change is to galvanise resident associations. Meanwhile, Bina wants to know what she can do to shield herself from the radiation and wants to take up the matter with her RWA in the next meeting.