THE government efforts to work out and put in place rules to limit the loudness of sound in silent zones are a welcome move. The government is reported to be working on the Sound Pollution (Control) Rules 2025 after almost all its efforts in the past have failed to contain noise pollution. The government on September 29, 2024 declared a radius of 1.5 kilometres, covering both northern and southern areas of the Dhaka airport as a no-horn zone, effective from October 1 that year. The stretch spanned from Le M茅ridien Dhaka hotel to the campus of the Scholastica School at Uttara. The state of noise pollution has not improved. The same is the situation in the area surrounding the secretariat, which was declared a no-horn zone in December 2019. The Shahbagh area, home to Bangladesh Medical University hospital and BIRDEM General Hospital, has been no different in the honking of horns by vehicle drivers. The Sound Pollution (Control) Rules 2006 consequent on the Environment Conservation Act 1995 lays out that hospitals, educational institutions and office areas are silent zones and prohibits the honking of horns within a radius of 100 metres of such establishments.
Yet, the silver lining in the rules being worked on is that the limit would be in A-weighted decibel, which takes into account the sensitivity of human hearing to different frequencies, instead of decibel, which is a unit of measurement for sound pressure that indicates its levels. The rules would deal with noise pollution caused by firecrackers, the use of public address systems, electric generators, music systems, and building construction machines. The rules would declare protected marine areas, reserved forests, bird and wildlife sanctuaries, ecologically critical areas and protected tourist spots as silent zones in addition to a radius of 100 metres around hospitals, educational institutions and offices as laid out in the 2006 rules. The rules would also have provisions for punishment for the production, import and marketing of horns and public address systems that produce noise beyond permissible limits. The commerce ministry and relevant authorities would be barred from allowing the import of horns that produce sounds beyond the permissible limit. Whilst the rules would have harsher punishment in the event of any breach of the law and the rules, the police would also be empowered to act against noise pollution. But, the crux remains in the enforcement of the rules, which has so far, perhaps, held back the existing legislation from being effectively enforced.
Even after all this, the major issue that would remain for the authorities to attend to is the deployment of an effective, round-the-clock oversight mechanism. In the absence of such oversight, whatever the government does to legally control noise pollution would remain ineffective. The government should put in as much effort to ensure oversight on noise pollution.
