Ranchi, June 10: The principle earlier was ?pollute & pay?. Now it is ?pay & pollute?.

When environment control laws were enacted, the idea was that polluting units would be penalised. But sadly, it is the people who are punished and offending units are let off after paying a handsome bribe to the board. Pollution control boards, say experts, can safely be renamed ?pay and pollute boards?.

There is of course a pollution control board in Jharkhand as well, which has a failed politician for a chairman and an unqualified person for a member-secretary. The bloated board has as many as 170 people employed with it. Their break-up is even more interesting since there are 95 casual workers, according to the member-secretary.

Asked to describe their job profile, the member-secretary claimed they are posted at the headquarters and the four regional offices of the board at Jamshedpur, Hazaribagh, Dhanbad and Deoghar ? and they do all the manual work.

The number is absurdly high because on a given day the board can only send out 10 teams, not more, since there are only 10 engineers at its disposal. In other words, each of the teams theoretically has the luxury of carrying around nine casual workers to carry the equipment. That would make the board one of the most active boards in the country and the state government has been generous in allowing it an annual budget of Rs 4 crore.

It is a different story when the board is asked to spell out what it has done. There is a serious shortage of experts, the member-secretary informs, and services of 25 more engineers will be required for the board to function normally, he claims. It also claims to have notified several norms, which are even better than the national norms.

For example, the board has fixed the emission norm in Jharkhand to be 150 mg per Nm3 as against the earlier norm of 350 mg/Nm3. What the member-secretary fails to mention is that the national emission norm is 1,200 mg/Nm3 and even a state like Maharashtra follows a norm of 250 mg/Nm3. More stringent emission norms mean that virtually no industrial unit can match it, thus making it easier for the board to either harass the unit or let it go for a consideration.

Sources say the board has been reduced to a ?corrupt clerk? whose job is confined to issuing NOCs (no objection certificates) and consent letters to new industrial units, often without verifying the claims. An industrialist, who operates a sponge iron unit, says he had never followed emission norms.

But he never had any difficulty in getting the clearance certificates.