An Assessment of Indoor Environment Quality: A Case Study of Bijnor City, Uttar Pradesh

An Assessment of Indoor Environment Quality A Case Study of Bijnor City, Uttar Pradesh. Samina Quazi* Department of Geography Jamia Millia Islamia Indoor quality is one of the major issues to which we are facing today. Indoor environment quality (IEQ) is defined as the wholesome indoor environment in which people spend most of their time. According to the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency of U. S) people on an average spend approximately 90 percent of their time indoors, most of it in their residences. Therefore, the IEQ bears directly on the human health and wellbeing though not immediately but slowly. The World Health Report, 2002 reveals that it is the 10th risk factor and accounts for 2.7 percent of the global burden of disease. With adoption of the New Economic Policy in 1991, environmentalists and concerned scientists became active and a large number of researches have been and still are being carried out on the pollution of outdoor air and its ill health effects. But, there are few and far between such researches in the case of indoor air. These too have focused on the big cities, perhaps underlying assumption being that this problem is more acute in these big population agglomerations. But, the reality is contrary to general perception of the situation. In spite of the fact of widespread use of LPG, the biomass is still a major fuel in the majority of households in small cities, towns and particularly in villages. This fuel not only produces lot of smoke but also is the main source of many hazardous gases and also of volatile organic compounds (VOC), sustained exposure to which may be fatal. This constituted the stimulus to make a case study of Bijnor, a small town in the western Uttar Pradesh which in popular notion is a wholesome area with ambient air away from the industrial, vehicular and other sources of air pollution. *Cartographer in the Department of Geography, JMI, New Delhi (ssameen8@gmail. com)