Source apportionment will help Delhi nail pollution, says Rai
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The specialised machines here can read total carbon, black carbon and metals. These recordings will help us know if the pollution levels are coming from vehicles, coal-fired power plants or road dust.
REPRESENTATIVE, University of Washington
NEWDELHI: Environment minister Gopal Rai on Friday visited an air quality monitoring centre near India Gate—managed by the Delhi government in partnership with the University of Washington —to understand the recording of pollution data.
Delhi experiences hazardous levels of pollution every year, especially in winter.
Measures such as the odd-even road rationing scheme, restrictions on the use of diesel generator sets and construction ban year after year has proved to be inadequate in combating the high pollution levels.
The monitoring station, located at Major Dhyanchand National Stadium complex, has been equipped with state-of-theart technology to monitor realtime pollution emission. The University of Washington has over the last year installed three machines at the centre to help analyse the source of emissions in the national capital.
Scientists working on the project said the system installed at the centre is equipped to record PM 1 (ultrafine particulate matter with diameter less than one micrometre), PM 2.5 (particulate matter with diameter less than 2.5 micrometre), PM 10 (particulate matter with diameter less than 10 micrometre), nitrogen oxide (NOX), carbon dioxide (CO2), and sulphur dioxide (SO2).
“Apart from this, the specialised machines installed here can read total carbon, black carbon and metals. These recordings will help us know if the pollution levels in the atmosphere are coming from vehicles, coal-fired power plants or road dust,” said a University of Washington representative.
A study based on the recordings will be submitted to the government by the university by March this year.
Rai said the real-time recording of pollutants and its source apportionment will finally help the Delhi government nail the issues of pollution.
“Several studies have been shared on the air quality index (AQI) of Delhi and the contribution of PM10 and PM2.5 levels to Delhi’s pollution,” Rai said.
He added, “We have 26 pollution monitoring centres under the Delhi government at various locations in Delhi. The mechanism in these centres monitors AQI at a particular point of time in a span of one hour. But the mechanism has failed to detect the sources of pollution.”
Before this, studies by Iitkanpur (2016) and The Energy Resources Institute (2018) have presented a picture of the growing pollution levels in the national capital.