By Banwan Lyngdoh
How many of those who have travelled the Shillong–Guwahati road have noticed the names Byrnihat and Burnihat? It is the ‘y’ and the ‘u’ that mark the boundary between Meghalaya and Assam: Byrnihat falls under Meghalaya, while Burnihat is Assam’s. But ever since a Swiss company labelled “Byrnihat” the most polluted metropolitan area in the world in March 2025, the place has become a favourite subject for news portals and social-media creators; the so-called “influencers”.
These influencers have tried hard to sway the uninitiated with their biased narratives. The formula is familiar: take Meghalaya’s reputation as one of the cleanest and greenest states in the country, set it beside the “world’s most polluted city,” and the contrast writes itself. Videos built on this formula have crossed a million views. What almost none of them tell the viewer is where those damning numbers actually came from, and who has actually been acting on the problem.
But the pollution in Byrnihat is real and serious. Respiratory infection cases in the area rose from 2,082 in 2022 to 3,681 in 2024, a jump of 77 per cent, as per district health data. Nobody who has driven through the town in winter needs convincing. The people living there deserve clean air, and they also deserve an honest account of the problem. That honest account looks very different from the one circulating on the internet.
For clarity, Byrnihat is not a city, and it does not belong to one state. It is an industrial belt cut in two by the Assam-Meghalaya border, about 20 kilometres from Guwahati on the highway to Shillong. The officially demarcated industrial cluster measures about 6 square kilometres, of which 2.87 falls in Ri-Bhoi district of Meghalaya and 3.13 in Kamrup Metropolitan district of Assam.
Its one valley is governed by two governments and their two pollution control boards. The National Clean Air Programme lists Byrnihat under Meghalaya. The Central Pollution Control Board’s list of critically polluted industrial clusters, prepared in 2018, names it “Byrnihat (Assam)” with a score of 78.31, among the worst in the country. The CPCB’s daily air quality bulletins report the town’s station as “Byrnihat, Assam”. Even the Swiss company IQAir, whose report started the storm, places Byrnihat under Assam on its own website. Yet the headlines, almost without exception, say “Meghalaya’s Byrnihat”.
Until December 2025, the only real-time, round-the-clock air quality monitor in Byrnihat stood on the Assam side of the border, at the Central Academy for State Forest Service along the highway, run under the Pollution Control Board of Assam. It is this station that produced the headlines, including an AQI of 341 on January 26, 2025.
Meghalaya’s side of the town was covered by four manual stations of the State Pollution Control Board, at the Export Promotion Industrial Park (EPIP), 15th Mile, 17th Mile and Khasi Killing, which recorded an annual PM2.5 average of 50.1 for 2024. That is high, but it is less than half the figure of 128.2 that made Byrnihat world famous.
When Chief Minister Conrad Sangma told the Assembly that the ranking rested largely on data from a monitor his government does not operate, in a state his government does not govern, he was stating a plain fact about where the machines stand.
The industrial picture tells a similar story. Meghalaya’s side is anchored by the Export Promotion Industrial Park, a planned estate set up in 1996 with a single, named regulator. As per the figures placed before the public in March 2025, the Meghalaya side has about 41 units of which less than five fall in the red category, the classification reserved for the most polluting industries. It is also noteworthy that none of these red category industries were established under the current Government.
The Assam side, which grew as an unplanned cluster of coke ovens and cement grinding units on private land, has about 39 units of which around 20 are red category. Assam’s own Pollution Control Board Chairman admitted that at least 10 of those units had not even installed pollution control devices. If one still doubts where the weight of the problem lies, consider what happened in February 2025.
The Meghalaya government had shut its Byrnihat industries, first six units in September 2024 and then seven more from end January to mid March 2025, for violations it made public. For the whole of February, the heavy industry on the Meghalaya side was substantially closed. The air did not clear. The Assam-side monitor continued to record readings in the very poor range while Meghalaya’s stations read 92 which is satisfactory. The scientific study commissioned from CSIR-NEERI points the same way: road dust is the largest source of coarse dust, industries on both sides contribute the fine particles, and the endless truck traffic on the national highway, waste burning and the bowl-shaped valley that traps air in winter do the rest.
It is worth asking which government has actually acted – It is Meghalaya that closed its own revenue-earning units, imposed environmental compensation, made online emission monitoring compulsory, commissioned the NEERI study, installed its own real-time monitoring station in December 2025, and wrote to Assam proposing a joint committee, a proposal the Assam Chief Minister rightly welcomed.
When a viral video last month blamed an ethanol plant in the EPIP for the town’s condition, the Pollution Control Board inspected the plant within days and published its findings. The plant, it may be noted, began production only in September 2024, after Byrnihat had already been declared critically polluted and ranked India’s most polluted city. Blaming it for the ranking is putting the cart before the horse. Meanwhile, much of the imagery used in this coverage has been of factories that are not in Byrnihat at all, including stock photographs of snowy foreign landscapes and, lately, pictures generated by artificial intelligence.
None of this is a clean chit for Meghalaya’s industries; the closed units were closed because they broke the rules, and enforcement must continue without fear or favour. But the need of the hour is not another viral video. It is a joint, empowered mechanism covering the entire cluster on both sides of the border, equal scrutiny of the Assam-side units, completion and publication of the NEERI source study, and correction of the official records that list one town under two states. The wind does not stop at the border, and neither should responsibility.
Byrnihat and Burnihat deserve serious attention, fairly directed. The people chasing followers will move on to the next sensation. The people of Byrnihat and Burnihat will still be breathing this air. And these YouTubers, running after viral views, should stop tarnishing our beautiful state sans facts for their own wallets.
