Foreword
Under the Water (Prevention & Control of Pollution) Act, 1974 and Air {Prevention & Control of Pollution) Act, 1981, industries are required to obtain consent from State Pollution Control Boards/Pollution Control Committees at the Union Territory level for discharge of effluent and emission. From time to time, it has been felt that all the industries should not come under the purview of the consent procedure and a rationale should be established to identify such categories of industrial units in respect of which consent mechanism should continue, while others should be given a waiver considering their pollution potential.

With this in view, the Central Board took up an exercise for preparing an approach document, the basic work of which was done by Dr. K.R. Ranganathan, former Member Secretary of Central Pollution Control Board and now Professor at the Centre of Environmental Studies, Anna University, Madras. A team of my colleagues including Dr. D.D. Basu and Dr. S.P. Chakrabarti with secretarial support from Smt. Rajni Arora coordinated the work for finalising the document in its present state.