Maryam Rustomjee (name changed) had lived on Kolkata’s Park Street ever since she could remember. What she did not realise was that she had been, in fact, participating in the ‘boiling frog’ phenomenon. 

Over the years of her being resident on the city’s restaurant row, the street had retained its essential character – the music, the pastries, the uniformed girls and boys from some of the city’s top-rated schools located there, and the iconic Victorian-era colonial buildings. But the reason the boiling frog epithet was apt was what had been happening to the noise level on Park Street. Over the years, traffic had grown and honking had multiplied, slowly and innocuously, until Park Street had graduated from a quiet stroll-worthy avenue to a busy bustling street to sheer sonic hell. To the extent that when students of the neighbourhood’s La Martiniere and Birla High, guided by the NGO PUBLIC [editor's note: the authors are founders of PUBLIC], launched a campaign against honking, the resulting drop in noise on the street made Rustomjee almost panic as she realised the quietness at home she had lost over time. Driven by a surge of gratitude, she went down to the street, found the NGO representative coordinating the campaign and thanked her. The representative told this author that Rustomjee had almost sobbed. 

As with the frog in the pot of water, so with traffic and honking in Kolkata: with gradual increases, whether temperature or traffic, the effect is ignored; and when the heat insidiously creeps up and reaches boiling point, it is too late, and the frog must perish because of its failure to respond to the early warnings. The same fate is creeping up on Kolkata residents as they ignore the increasing level of noise on their streets.

It is obvious that loud honking is disruptive. Children’s learning ability suffers, the elderly pay with ischemic heart disease and hypertension, and all strata risk hearing loss, particularly those whose occupation calls for long-term exposure to excessive street noise (traffic constables, hawkers and residents of high traffic volume streets). 

In addition to disturbed sleep, annoyance resulting from omnipresent noise may well be the cause of the multiple road rage reports that come in from Kolkata. A survey across 10 metro cities conducted in 2019 reported that more than half the respondents were likely to give in to road rage owing to feelings of stress – and 20% identified traffic as their biggest source of anger. A study in Germany found an increase of about 6.6% in violent crimes for a 4-decibel rise in daily noise. In England transport-noise action plans were put in place with the aim to reduce violent and public-order offenses.

The verdict, therefore, is clear and unambiguous. Based on studies by the World Health Organisation, there is strong evidence that noise affects cardiovascular and cognitive health, particularly in the elderly and children, and disturbs sleep – which has its own consequences on health, productivity and even law and order. 

Lawmakers have recognized the need for putting the lid on noise. Based on the Environment (Protection) Act in 1986 and the Noise Pollution Rules of 2000, sources of noise, such as loudspeakers and generators, have been largely curbed and most Indian cities show a similar range in average daytime noise levels – between 60 and 80 decibels. 

But where Kolkata is an exception is the manner in which noise caused by honking appears to always be increasing. Public buses with screaming air horns careen brazenly through the city, this despite the Supreme Court order of December 2013 setting a deadline for their removal by January 2014. The State Pollution Control Board, having blithely promoted limits on noise levels for different zones, was unable to respond to an RTI application by a Kolkata resident Ashok Mansata as to how “residential” zones are defined. As another Illustration of the lax attitude toward noise being recognized as a problem by the state and its agencies, the order setting noise limits for fireworks passed in 1996 by the “sound crusader”, Justice Bhagwati Prasad Banerjee, was watered down and a noise level of 125dB (against the 90dB in the order) was set as the acceptable limit. 

Where the future is frightening is with respect to the number of vehicles on the road. Estimates of the year-on-year growth in registration of new vehicles in Kolkata shows a 15% growth in 2024-25 over the previous year, with two-wheelers holding a 60% share. We believe that Kolkata is adding 26 vehicles per hour to its current stock – and it already is one of the most crowded cities in the world. In 2024, according to this TOI report, Kolkata added 100,167 new vehicles. If we take 26 "selling" days a month, 12 selling hours a day, we get this figure of 26 – way above the 11 in the TOI report

New registrations expectedly come with new drivers – unsure and nervous, as in the case of the swerving and snaking two-wheelers, or loaded with braggadocio, commonly seen in the case of I-have-arrived SUV owners asserting their status on the road. Club these with the cruelty to which 10-minute ‘delivery partners’ are subjected – speeding to unload their consignment before you can blink – and you have the Kolkata cacophony. Open air concerts at the Victoria Memorial, the piping of shehnai from a wedding or Rabindrasangeet during the Pujas are pathetically feeble competitors – it is honking that prevails, loud and clear.

The search for solutions will, invariably, be biased toward technology and hardware. Methods to contain noise at source (sound limiters) and in transit (buffers) have been experimented with, including a supposedly “punishing signal” in Mumbai  that resets the traffic light if noise from honking at the intersection exceeds 85dB.  

But if the solution is to be effective and long-term, it must come from within the traffic management system – as in the case of car drivers wearing seat belts and two-wheeler riders wearing helmets. In both these cases, it was enforcement that produced behaviour change. In the specific context of honking, when students from a few schools in south Kolkata obtained police support for their street campaign against honking in “silence zones” outside their schools and hospitals, crudely measured before-after data showed a 60% drop in the number of honks heard when traffic police joined the students and fined violators. Our NGO PUBLIC conducted this study and, to our knowledge, this was, in fact, the only "study" of its kind. We did it to objective standards by counting the number of times honks were heard by a couple of observers keeping count.

A comparison of noise as an evil with air pollution is weakened by insufficient data on noise and the drama of air pollution’s visibility. But even though the effects of noise are insidious and invisible, a quiet environment still is a fundamental right. The wisdom shared by Justice Bhagwati Prasad Banerjee, 30 years ago, may be worth recalling: “Nobody can be made a captive listener… it is our fundamental right…not to hear.”

Bonani Kakkar is founder-president of People United for Better Living in Kolkata (PUBLIC). Pradeep Kakkar is founder-member of PUBLIC.

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