No, the word grill is fine here - I just wanted to know whether this grill enclosed the whole balcony, or whether it was just at the bottom, or, as it turns out, with a wall and then a grill right to the roof.
It's not that easy an area to plant with large, beautiful plants - if you use climbing plants, unless you keep them very well trained, they will grow up the grill and will block out most of the light. Equally, if you use tall, wide plants, you'll be blocking light, although in pots, most plants don't get as large as they would in the ground. That said, the next problem is a shortage of sunlight, so that rules out some plants which only do well with plenty of sun.
Two I've come up with which will do fine in the sunlight available are Jasmine multipartum (climber, mostly evergreen, very fragrant flowers) and Eranthemum pulchellum (also known as Eranthemum nervosum), a free standing shrub which has blue flowers. Otherwise, Thuja pyramidalis compacta I found mentioned as a plant to grow in your part of the world, though I confess to being a little surprised - Thuja does well in places like Canada, so the conditions are somewhat different. Might be worth a try though, it's evergreen and won't get too large in a pot, and this plant should have better (though not necessarily very noticeable) noise reduction capacity. Otherwise, Clematis hybrid varieties (not species like montana or tangutica), though again, they're climbers, and having too many will definitely mean a reduction in light, and most flower much better with more sunlight on their topgrowth. Even so, if you can find them, Clematis Hagley Hybrid and Nelly Moser are two that do well in shadier conditions, and the fact there's a wall means the roots will be kept a bit cooler. Climbers will need pots which are preferably 2 feet deep and 12-16 inches wide to achieve reasonable growth.
Whether any of these will make any major difference to the noise and pollution is another matter, but they will improve the area visually.
