Centre’s clean air plan goes beyond urban areas
NEWDELHI: A draft of the National Clean Air Programme that the Union environment ministry will finalise in less than a month broadens the focus from Delhi to 100 non-attainment cities across India and calls for guidelines on indoor air pollution.
The ministry told the Supreme Court on Friday that the plan, that seeks to reduce pollution by 35% in three years and 50% in five years, will be finalised within four weeks.
The country’s apex pollution regulator, the Central Pollution Control Board, has identified 94 cities that flout national standards for particulate matter pollution and are called “non-attainment cities”, and a few others that flout norms for other pollutants. The action plan also aims to ensure that all locations in the country meet the national air quality norms, however, a time frame was not provided in the draft version shared with Greenpeace India through an RTI request. “This should have happened 20 years ago, till now they have been dumping polluting industries, vehicles outside Delhi,” MC Mehta, environmental lawyer, who is a petitioner in the decades-long case to tackle air pollution in the top court.
Other environmentalists criticised the plan for lacking specific timelines and directions.
“The draft needs more clarity in terms of articulating interim milestones for completing source apportionment studies to reduce 35% & 50% pollution in three and five years respectively along with specific targets for polluting sectors such power and industry,” Sunil Dahiya, air pollution campaigner with Greenpeace India, said.
Less than 10% of 4,000 cities are covered by the manual air quality monitoring network. The plan aims to expand it from the existing 680 stations to 1,000 stations. Continuous air quality monitoring, which helps generate regular updates useful for public, will be expanded from 40 to 67 cities with the number of stations growing from 55 to 268.
The monitoring of PM2.5, fine particulate matter capable of penetrating deeper into the body, will be increased from 67 to all stations. Calling indoor air pollution and ozone a “neglected issue” in rural areas, the National Air Quality Monitoring Programme said 50 stations will come up in rural areas.