Music to our ears

A positive happenstance of the Covid-19 induced pandemic was the drastic fall in sound pollution. With people being forced to stay indoors or curb their movement, the levels of noise pollution plummeted. There were no loudspeakers or jarring construction sounds, and most importantly, there was a tremendous reduction in honking! The sound of silence was a welcome break to our strained eardrums and the forgotten music of chirping birds greeted many of us in our overcrowded metros. With the growth of the Indian population and the consequent increase in buying power, two-wheeler and three-wheeler usage increased exponentially over the last decade. Today, vehicles have emerged as one of the primary sources of noise pollution.

Most of us don't even realise the harm that sound pollution wreaks on our mental and physical selves. Cardiovascular diseases, anxiety, headaches, lack of focus, dizziness, and of course, loss of hearing are all by-products of being exposed to continuous sound pollution. And while we have sound limits in India, they are rarely followed. Honking vehicles can touch decibel levels of 100 and above while permissible levels in residential areas are around 55 dB during the day and 45 dB at night.

In this context, it's excellent news that Union Road Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari intends to act on vehicular noise pollution. The minister realised the need to change car horns due to the incessant honking that often disrupts his Pranayama sessions in the morning. Honking is so loud and rampant that he can hear it all the way in his 11th floor Nagpur residence; a problem that many of us would have in common with the minister. Gadkari's idea is to make car horns sound like musical instruments (table, violin, flute etc). I keep imagining a traffic signal in a bustling metro where all cars, bikes, commercial vehicles, and buses honk but soothing sounds of various musical instruments waft out. And suddenly, there's an impromptu orchestra that plays out; like a musical flash mob! It's a happy thought in my head though it would be best if they didn't honk at all! It also remains to be seen if car manufacturers would play to the minister's tunes while there are chances of a law on its enforcement soon.

The minister also said that automakers would be asked to use the 'right type of horn'. Now this statement itself is a positive one. We need to control the honking by vehicles; there's no two ways around it. While there are sound limits and enough pictorial instructions in our cities persuading people to avoid honking, these instructions fall on deaf ears. The Indian driver manoeuvres his vehicle with a foot on the accelerator and a finger on the horn. We love honking! And to be fair, Indian roads are so congested thanks to an ever-growing population, that half of them in most cities are occupied by jaywalkers with little adherence to rules governing pedestrians.

In some Indian cities, the problem is so acute that it's impossible to be on the road without the safety of noise cancellation headphones playing music. Now this solution works for people who are still sensitive to loud sounds. There are many among our population who are immune to loud sounds; now don't think they are unaffected; it's just that their hearing is already damaged. I have written about this earlier — a person living in Delhi has the hearing age of a person 20 years his senior. Indian cities routinely feature in the noisiest cities in the world list. 90 per cent of the 70 noise monitoring stations under the National Ambient Noise Monitoring Network in seven Indian cities (Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Lucknow, Chennai) show noise levels above the permissible limit during the day and night; sometimes even more than double the allowed decibel mark.

It's not that there haven't been rules or threats of fines. The National Green Tribunal (NGT) asked automakers to give their customers information about sound levels during the time of sale. The Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) has proposed fines between Rs 1,000 and Rs 1 lakh to be levied on those flouting noise limits. Mumbai Police also tried a novel approach — they ran an experiment aptly named as the 'Punishing Signal' wherein if honking at a traffic junction exceeded the permitted decibel limit, the signal would reset! In Kerala, the police have advanced sound meters that can measure if a horn is too loud and penalise accordingly.

So, while we have failed to build awareness among the general populace to go soft on the honking, perhaps the only plausible way to curb vehicular sound pollution would be to go to the source and silence (or in this case, lower) the primary culprit — the horn. Here's hoping that the automobile manufacturers are listening.

The writer is an author and media entrepreneur. views expressed are personal