The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) is reportedly planning to launch its own radiation testing laboratory under the Telecommunication Engineering Centres (TEC) from March 2012 onwards.
Under existing rules, a penalty of Rs 0.5 million can be imposed on a tower for non-compliance with radiation norms.
Meanwhile, DoT has accepted the recommendations of an Inter-Ministerial group which are more stringent than the earlier radiation norms.
Prior to this, DoT had adopted the International Commission On Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP) guidelines, where it fixed the specific energy absorption (SAR) rate at 2 Watt per kilogramme in the frequency range of 10 MHz to 10 GHz for a mobile phone.
Under the latest guidelines, the SAR level has been lowered to 1.6 Watt per kilogramme averaged over a six minutes period and taken over a volume containing a mass of 1 gram of human tissue.
For mobile phone towers, the new radiation norm issued by DoT also lowered the limit of emission from telecom towers by one-tenth compared to earlier adopted levels.
Under the new guidelines, emissions from telecom antennas mounted on mobile towers should be equivalent to the frequency range in which the antenna operates and the exposed area under the antenna is now 10 times larger compared to 200 square meter mentioned in the earlier guidelines.
