Cow dung paint in India: Union Minister Nitin Gadkari not too long ago launched ‘Khadi Prakritik Paint’, a paint produced out of cow dung. Developed by the Khadi and Village Industries Commission (KVIC), the paint is getting claimed to be non-toxic, possessing anti-bacterial and anti-fungal properties, as effectively as eco-friendly. Moreover, given that cow dung is the primary element in this paint, the paint is expense-powerful. The paint has been produced odourless, as effectively. Khadi Prakritik Paint has been launched only soon after it received the certification from Bureau of Indian Standards. Minister Gadkari mentioned that the move would help in growing the earnings of the farmers and enhancing the rural economy.
The paint has been launched in two variants – distemper, priced at Rs 120 a litre, and emulsion, at Rs 225 a litre. The price tag is drastically significantly less than that of other paints.
Moreover, the paint, according to a statement by the Union Ministry of Micro, Small & Medium Enterprises, does not include components like mercury, lead, chromium, cadmium as effectively as arsenic.
Khadi Prakritik Paint: Why eco-friendly paint matters
A study performed by the Centre for Science and Environment in 2008 and 2009, had located that as numerous as 72% of the samples tested by them contained lead samples that vastly exceeded the permissible limit set by the Bureau of Indian Standards. The limits set by regulatory authorities in India call for providers to self-certify their compliance with these measures, creating it more of a voluntary requirement than a mandatory a single.
Numerous research have shown that paints include toxic chemical substances, in particular lead, which can have significant impacts on the healths of folks exposed to the fumes. This is in particular accurate for youngsters, in whom, fumes from lead-containing paints can lead to reduced IQ levels.
While the study by CSE was performed more than 10 years ago, in 2017, Delhi-primarily based NGO Toxic Link, which has had various published researches on the concern, once more studied the levels of lead in most paints. Even soon after practically a decade, the study located a whopping 73% of paint samples possessing lead levels larger than the essential 90 ppm, indicating barely any transform at the ground level in terms of compliance to these requirements.
The only sliver of hope was a handful of significant providers supplying lead-free of charge options, when most nonetheless continued to sell paints containing damaging levels of lead.
Keeping this in consideration, the paint created by KVIC would play a quite crucial function in minimizing chemical-primarily based paints and the threats to wellness that they pose.