In India’s only event on Green Telecom, the 2nd International conference Green Telecom India 2010, a controversy enlivened the participants when the issue of high level of radiation and pollution from equipments and telecom towers were discussed.
Rajiv Mehrotra, the president of Telecom Equipment Manufacturers Association (TEMA), questioned the foreign manufacturers and their policies of implementing low levels of radiation for their equipments in their countries and why the same technology was not implemented for the products being sold in India.
As per international data as much as 2.8mn tones out of the 3.8mn tones of global pollution was generated from India also even though India has lesser mobile phone subscribers. The arguments of the TEMA chairman were later opposed by Rajan Mathew, director-general of Cellular Operators Association of India.
Rajiv Mehrotra said “One telecom tower company uses two billion liters of diesel. In the West they do not radiate at such high power in the tower. One base station leaves 60 tons of carbon dioxide a year. The numbers already installed spew 6mn tons of CO2 every year. More cells, more noise and more radiation”. He also stated that the cell phones and towers would be reaching close to 6 lakh villages in the near future.
His other remarks about sparrows being the victims of the radiation from these telecom towers also caused a lot of uproar in the audience.
Rajan Mathew, director-general of Cellular Operators Association of India, said in a joint study of EMF of telecom equipment conducted by IIT Madras, telecom operators and Madurai Engineering college is 100 locations, it has been found that in each of these sites, the level was just a thousand part of what was mandated by the International standards. He also concluded that since the telecom industry formed just half a per cent of the ICT industry total, the pollution levels could not be this appalling.
As one of the main sources of communication, Mobile phones are being views as causing uneven impact on pollution according to Mathew. Another reason that has been forcing mobile phone operators to install more cell sites was the availability of limited spectrum in India when compared to most of the developed countries.
