India’s cities are growing harmfully louder. In traffic-choked streets, hospital corridors and residential neighbourhoods, urban noise is omnipresent yet treated mostly as a nuisance rather than a measurable health risk.

Millions of Indians are exposed daily to noise associated with cardiovascular disease, sleep disruption, cognitive fatigue, and psychological stress^1,2.

For India’s noise monitoring to become meaningful, regular audits and continuous, hyper-local data collection are needed, says Aritrik Das at the Department of Community Medicine in PGIMER, Chandigarh.

One of the challenges, he says, is the difficulty in isolating noise sources in this cocktail of cacophony, which leads to “exposure misclassification”. “And, therefore, connecting environmental noise to specific health outcomes remains difficult,” Das says.

Workplace noise above 80 dB(A) — a decibel scale adjusted for human hearing — has been linked to headaches, concentration loss, tinnitus, fatigue and sleep disruption1. Environmental noise often exceeds 70 dB(A), mostly from road traffic, says Sharad Gokhale who studied² the phenomenon at Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati. In the northeastern state of Guwahati, horns pushed levels up to 80 dB(A), a range tied to cardiovascular strain, stress, and sleep disturbance. His colleague Argha Kamal Guha, now at Adamas University, Kolkata, says chronic mid-level exposure to noise was found to trigger heightened cortisol responses.

Yet monitoring stations routinelyrecord 65–75 dB(A) without triggering advisories or action. Even silent zones near hospitals, schools, and courts are poorly enforced. Noise sources often continue unchecked when limits are breached, says activist Anil Sood at the non-government organisation Chetna.

A six-year study³ in Kota city of Rajasthan showed noise in 'silence' and residential zones soaring up to 77 dB(A) — nearly 30 dB above safe limits — and nighttime levels in quiet areas still hitting 68.6 dB(A). Across the city, residents faced harmful exposure, with cumulative risk in some zones more than 1.5 times the safe threshold.

It’s not just volume but type of noise that matters, says Abhay Raj at CSIR–Indian Institute of Toxicology Research in Lucknow. Peaks from honking trigger acute stress, while continuous traffic and generator hum cause chronic stress, concentration loss, and sleep disruption. High-frequency noise (2–8 kHz) damages hearing; low-frequency noise (<250 Hz) contributes to hypertension and cognitive fatigue.

Raj says temperature, humidity, wind, and urban form shape noise propagation, especially in dense, mixed-use cities like Lucknow. These findings mirror patterns documented by India’s National Ambient Noise Monitoring Network.

Launched in 2011, the network has 82 stations nationwide, including 26 in Delhi, but experts say design flaws limit usefulness. Poor sensor placement, obstructed by trees or buildings, blunts frequency capture and misses peaks, says Satish K. Lokhande at CSIR-National Environmental Engineering Research Institute in Nagpur. An app he developed computes real-time acoustic indicators, including loudness, peak frequency, and percentile variability.

Most stations report only average levels. They do not capture source-specific or time-resolved characteristics – factors that drive health impacts, says Kushagra Rajendra of Amity University.

Fixed stations are also ill-suited to short-duration, source-driven noise, which dominates daily urban life, according to Yhonk India, a start-up using IoT-based systems to track horn use.

Experts argue for city-specific noise maps and hyper-local monitoring, even with short-duration measurements at critical locations. Such data would provide a far more robust basis for regulation, says Harish C. Phuleria of IIT Bombay’s Air and Noise Exposure Research Group.

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