ISLAMABAD, May 8: The Pakistan Environmental Protection Agency (Pak-EAP) will soon start 24-hour monitoring of the quality of air in the city’s industrial area with the help of high-tech laboratories.

“We have marked four to five locations in I-9 and I-10 sectors for continuous monitoring by state-of-the-art labs which we recently acquired,” an official told Dawn on Tuesday.

There will be two kinds of monitoring —stack-monitoring and ambient-monitoring— to pinpoint the steel mills fouling the city’s air most.

The government has acquired five such labs, one each for the federal and provincial capitals to monitor the air quality of the major urban centres of the country.

There are three other labs for stack-monitoring, which would help examine the quality of smoke coming straight out of the chimneys of factories in Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi.

Until now, the Pak-EPA used to collect data on the industrial area as a whole, with the result that every polluting factory could claim to be clean and throw the blame on others.

Now the new labs would enable the Pak-EPA to collect data on each individual factory thus pinpointing the culprit, the official said. Asked if that would also ensure effective action by the Pak- EPA against the guilty factory, the official said “in the presence of exact data, it will not be possible for a factory owner to get away with the offence.”

In response to another question, the official said in the changed scenario, it would no longer be an easy-going affair and the responsible mill owners would be taken to the task. “If the Environment Protection Act is not followed in its true spirit, the city would soon join the rest of the urban centres of the country, where both air and water pollutions have crossed dangerous levels,” the official warned.

Over the last few years, the federal capital has witnessed increased air and water pollution, which has been confirmed by independent sources. Islamabad was once considered the cleanest city of the country but now it is increasingly losing its natural beauty and charm.

The official argued that the agency was taking every possible measure to check the increasing pollution in the city. “This time, if found guilty, the agency would immediately issue (an) Environmental Protection Order under which a fine of up to Rs1 million could be imposed on the respondent and in case of continued violation, an additional fine of Rs100,000 could be enforced for every single day during which (the) contravention continues.”

The environmental tribunal, if satisfied with the agency’s observations, can sentence a factory owner for a term, which may be extended up to two years.

The tribunal can also order closure of a factory or confiscation of equipment and material used against the provision of the Environment Protection Act.