A draft report of the Public Accounts Committee of Parliament has expressed shock that Department of Telecommunication has no monitoring mechanism to verify authenticity of the self-certification of the operators, deprecating "such a mindless arrangement made by the DoT to check the radiation level."
India has no mechanism whatsoever to date to monitor the suspected harmful electromagnetic field radiation from the mobile towers that dot skyline of every city and town and even villages.
The responsibility rests on the DoT, but it washed its hands off by issuing a circular in November 2009, asking the mobile companies to test and certify the radiation emitting from their Base Transceiver Stations.
The DoT's censure is part of the PAC's draft report on the 2G scam that was turned down by the Lok Sabha Speaker, and is now placed before the new PAC by its chairman Dr Murli Manohar Joshi.
The PAC rejected the regulator Telecom Regulatory Authority of India's opinion that self-certification is an option until some method to regularly collect the EMF radiation signals is developed. It asked the DoT to examine the feasibility of introducing a more effective and reliable mechanism.
It also recommended that an inter-ministerial group of DoT and ministries of health and environment be set up to make a joint study of the harmful radiation of EMF on human beings and the flora and fauna and thereafter devise a suitable monitoring mechanism to keep it within the permissible level as per the international norms.
The PAC noted that studies in several countries under the World Health Organisation prove that the emissions from the mobile phone towers and networks are causing harmful effects on humans and the World Health Organisation has also endorsed the guidelines published by the International Commission on Non-Ionising Radiation Protection for limiting radiation exposure.
Instead of implementing these guidelines, the DoT issued the circular in November 2009, directing the mobile phone service licensees to implement them.
