Govt to organise conference on air pollution: Gopal Rai

New Delhi: Delhi Environment Minister Gopal Rai on Sunday announced the city government will hold a digital round-table conference on April 12-13 to address the issue of air pollution in the national capital. The minister said in a statement that theme of the conference will be “Measures to be taken to reduce air pollution in Delhi before winter 2021”. “The work that our government has done in the last six years to fix the environment and improve the environmental condition has made a positive beginning in reducing Delhi’s pollution, but it is not enough. Therefore, to fix the air quality of Delhi and to solve the crisis the government has set a target to significantly reduce the pollution level in the next five years,” Rai said. He added that the Delhi government has set the target to reduce the city’’s pollution level by a third over the next five years. The conference will be attended by Dr Mukesh Sharma from IIT Kanpur; Dr Sagnik Dey of IIT Delhi; Sumit Sharma of TERI; Santosh Harish of Centre for Policy Research, Air Pollution Action Group; Karthik Ganesan of the Council on Energy, Environment and Water; representatives from CSE’’s Anumita Roy, professor Gufran Baig of Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, and Siddharth Virmani of the Energy Policy Institute of the University of Chicago. Along with this, social organisations and NGOs doing different work in the field of environment are also participating in it, Rai added. “On the basis of suggestions received from experts and organizations, the government will formulate a long-term action plan in order to tackle pollution in Delhi,” he said.