Set up air purifier towers, CM to BMC

Shinde borrows from the Capital’s muchcritiqued experiment

Yogesh Naik and Prayag Arora Desai

MUMBAI: Guess what is on chief minister Eknath Shinde’s mind, as the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) gets ready to present the civic budget on Saturday – to ensure clean air in Mumbai. The CM’s ask comes on the back of concerns raised by citizens about the city’s poor air quality index (AQI).

Borrowing from a much-critiqued Delhi experiment, Shinde has asked BMC’s commissioner I S Chahal to make provisions for air purifier towers in public places. Interestingly, last month reacting to Mumbai’s alarming poor air quality, the Maharashtra Pollution Control Board (MPCB) had decided to shoot the messenger rather than look for a solution, as reported by HT. The body decided to relocate nine stations run by the System of Air Quality Research and Forecasting (SAFAR), which give the AQI readings from their current spots, as the board believed they did not accurately reflect the city’s ambient air quality – a matter contested by senior officials in the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IIT-M).

The country’s first smog tower was inaugurated in Connaught Place, New Delhi, in

August 2021, followed by a second one in Anand Vihar, in September of the same year. At the time the devices were touted as a solution for the Capital’s mounting problem of air pollution. Delhi’s environment minister Gopal Rai even said that the devices, priced at ₹20 crore each, can “filter out 80 per cent of particulate matter”, much to the amusement of scientists.

The devices stand at an imposing height of 20 metres,

HT PHOTO A smog tower to control pollution at Lajpat Nagar in New Delhi. Shinde (right) seems to have taken inspiration from this.