Noise can drive Jayraj Salgaonkar, co-founder, editor and publisher of almanac Kalnirnay, up the wall. “I’ve always been extremely sensitive to sound,” he says, adding that a loud sound is akin to an electric shock. Silverware clashing or a remote control dropping to the floor are enough to leave him startled. It’s the reason why he decided to collaborate with the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT-B) to develop what he calls the Oren, a horn-usage metre. This was five years ago. The white plastic box has a numerical keypad and comes with a pre-paid limit. The metre is fixed in the car and measures the amount of electricity the horn draws from the battery. “You measure it and you pay for it,” explains Salgaonkar, who has been researching the technology for a decade. Indians are quite money-minded and this will be the only way they’ll learn to use the horn sparingly, he thinks. 

Traffic policemen are worse affected by noise pollution. In 2019, Dr Sarika Verma conducted an audiometry evaluation on 588 traffic policemen across eight Indian cities. “Traffic cops are typically exposed to loud noises for a minimum of eight hours a day. We found that 54 per cent of policemen had some level of hearing loss which they were not aware of,” she says. Pic/Sayyed Sameer Abedi