Some time towards the end of 2019, the Government of India will auction some 8,600 megahertz of telecom waves, from which it expects to rake in a whopping ₹6 lakh crore. The Centre will need the money to fill the yawing gap between its expenditure and income — the fiscal deficit. The thinking is that, once the deficit is under control, a sincere government will be able to apply its resources to development activities.
While the government raises ₹6 lakh crore, India would also progress several notches in technology. Communication speeds will be incredible; driverless vehicles, said to reduce accidents, will be enabled; the groundwork will be laid for movement towards the ‘internet-of-things’, or connecting all devices.
The government will be happy, the people will be happy. Great, no?
No. Because the flip side of this beautiful, unfolding story could be quite worrisome. Globally, a consensus is building around the view that to rapidly bring in 5G without proper studies is, to use a kind word, stupid.
Well.... yawn. So, what’s new? Each time there is a tech development, there emerges a crop of protesters who set out to stop it. It happened during the industrial revolution in England, giving the English language the word ‘luddites’. It has happened all the time in India. For example, when Tamil Nadu’s first ATM was set up, at the Harbour Branch of Indian Bank, the unions were up in arms, shouting, “we won’t allow”. So, there’s nothing unexpected about a protest against 5G, right?
Not quite. This time around the stakes appear to be pretty high — not just a perceived threat of loss of jobs. The threat to health, and even loss of life, cannot be ruled out.
Radiation and its effects
Many experts say that the transition from 4G to 5G is not the same as that from 3G to 4G, or the earlier technology upgrades. 5G-type electromagnetic waves are a higher frequency than 4G (and therefore further up the spectrum towards X-rays) though still on the non-ionising side. 5G networks will use extremely high frequencies, called ‘millimeter waves’ or ‘mmWaves’ (110-300 GHz) to achieve higher data speeds. Such frequencies have never been used before, anywhere in the world.
Radiation is energy that emerges out of something in a steady stream. A beam of light from an electric torch is radiation; a blast of cosy heat from a fireplace is radiation; radio-waves, micro-waves that are used for communication are also radiation. These are non-ionizing radiations, because the stream of energy is not strong enough to break the atoms in the cells in our bodies.
On the other hand, radiation out of, say, Uranium-235 or Plutonium, ultra-violet rays, gamma rays, and X-rays are all ionizing — it is so powerful that it destroys the cells in our bodies.
Now, though the radiation from 5G cellular towers may be non-ionizing, it is feared that it can set off in the cells a biological chain reaction, such as “oxidative stress”.
Biological safety tests, a must
Call it fear of the unknown, but a huge body of experts, globally, is cautioning against rushing into a rapid roll-out of 5G networks. One quote of Dr Martin Pall, Professor of Biochemistry and Basic Medical Sciences at the Washington State University, has now become famous. He has said: “Putting in tens of millions of 5G antennae without a single biological test of safety has got to be about the stupidest idea anyone has had in the history of the world.”
Others have also sounded similarly caution. Micheal Wyde, a toxicologist who has, for long, studied the effects of cellular radiation on rats, notes that 5G “is an emerging technology that hasn’t been defined yet” and “from what we currently understand, it likely differs dramatically from what we have studied”.
Even people like Kenneth Foster, a professor of bio-engineering at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied the health effects of RF (radio frequency) energy for long, and who has accused people such as Dr Martin Pall of “cherry-picking” findings from various studies, nevertheless calls for a more studies on health-related endpoints of a 5G rollout.
More studies needed
The concern about 5G has spread to India too, with many distinguished men of science calling for caution. These include Dr T Ramasami, former Secretary of the Department of Science and Technology, Dr Mahadevan Srinivasan, a former scientist at Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, N Vittal, a much-celebrated former Telecom Secretary, Prof Girish Kumar of IIT-Bombay and Dr RS Sharma of Indian Council for Medical Research, Delhi; the last two have studied the health effects of radiation.
There is also a story that while a 5G experiment was being carried out in October last year in The Netherlands, several birds fell dead and ducks behaved funnily, trying to keep their heads underwater.
As doubts about the ill-effects of 5G are reasonable, the call for further studies before its roll-out is only fair. If the government is committed to protecting public health, it should have neutral experts seriously review the scientific and medical evidence concerning any potential adverse impact of RF energy exposure on humans, and greenlight the technology’s rollout only if it is established to be safe.