Catch them young: PCB’s awareness video for kids

Kolkata: The West Bengal Pollution Control Board (WBPCB) is planning a digital conference with school and college students to sensitize them against firecrackers. Doctors will be asked to participate in the meeting to explain the hazards behind lighting fireworks amid the Covid pandemic.

At the meeting, students will be requested to shun fireworks and celebrate the festival by lighting diyas, fancy bulbs and candles to keep the environment clean so that the contagion chain is broken and the distress of Covid patients is not aggravated.

Sources in WBPCB said this meet will be held in addition to its annual Kali Puja meeting with housing society representatives. WBPCB chairman Kalyan Rudra is likely to address secretaries of around 300 housing societies on Friday to ask them to ensure no firecrackers are burst this year. The date of the meeting with the students hasn’t been fixed yet.

Before Kali Puja every year, WBPCB convenes a meeting with representatives of gated communities to reiterate the firecracker norms. This time, there will be a video conference, to which doctors will be invited to explain how crackers generate suspended particulate matter that can carry the coronavirus and how rising pollution levels would aggravate the condition of the Covid-affected.

“A similar meeting is being planned with students where doctors will be asked to tell them how firecrackers harm Covid patients and spread the virus,” a state official said. Punyabrata Goon, acting convenor, West Bengal Doctors’ Forum, said, “Students are seen as the prime consumers of the firecracker traders. So, the right awareness among the student community is the need of the hour.”

Schoolchildren, however, much as they are believed to be the biggest users of fireworks, don’t need much coaxing, it seemed. Class-XII student of DPS Ruby Park Kaulik Mitra, who lives at Ruchira Residency on EM Bypass, said, “Much before the authorities announced, my brother and I had decided to stay away from firecrackers. They should be banned forever.”

South Point School student Arnab Chatterjee, who lives in Salt Lake, said, “Our school has been talking about the ill-effects of fireworks for a long time. We have been made aware of the damage that the noise and smoke does to the environment. It’s time we completely shunned crackers.”


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