CAQM plans new tech gadgets to fight pollution

NEW DELHI: The Commission for Air Quality Management (CAQM) in National Capital Region (NCR) and Adjoining Areas on Thursday said it would tap the technical and academic expertise of reputed scientific institutions to tackle air pollution, while approving seven projects to tackle different aspects and sources of pollution in the region. The projects involve artificial intelligence, drones and developing a Decision Support System (DSS) tool for neighbouring NCR towns, CAQM said.

One project looks at counting vehicles using artificial intelligence and machine learning in order to develop an emissions inventory. This will also help assess traffic density on different roads. “The vehicle counting will be done by uploading footage from CCTV cameras on a cloud platform developed by Csir-national Environmental Engineering

Research Institute in Nagpur. This will help prepare the air pollution emission inventory with the help of vehicle count for urban centres,” said CAQM in a statement on Thursday.

Another project is an autonomous drone swarm framework, which will allow real-time air quality monitoring and pollution quantification in NCR’S hotspots. The project will be executed by the Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology in Patiala, Punjab. “The objective of the project is to develop an Ai-based technique for flying drones on a specified trajectory with minimal human intervention for real-time air quality monitoring,” CAQM said.

Other projects awarded and approved include an ambient air purification system developed by SASTRA University in Thanjavur. This project claims to reduce the Air Quality Index by 25-50% in an area and will be tested in a busy marketplace .

IIT Delhi’s “Under-actuated

Filterless Air Cleaner Retrofit for Rolling Stock and Vehicles” project is also one of the seven projects approved.

Pratima Singh, senior research scientist at the Center for Air Pollution Studies at the Center for Study of Science, Technology and Policy (CSTEP), said a majority of the projects consisted of monitoring devices and did not focus on control of emissions. “Low-hanging fruit such as waste-burning could have been tackled too,” she said.