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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | India's air pollution discourse needs to move beyond Delhi -Ragini Bhuyan

India's air pollution discourse needs to move beyond Delhi -Ragini Bhuyan

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published Published on Dec 30, 2016   modified Modified on Dec 30, 2016
-Livemint.com

We need a strategy to control air pollution across north India, and better monitoring is the first requirement

From the debate over Arvind Kejriwal’s odd-even policy to outrage over poisonous post-Diwali smog, India’s public discourse on air pollution was centred in and around Delhi in 2016. This needs to change if we want to evolve an effective strategy to counter pollution. Before delving into the reasons for this, it might be useful to understand a few things about measurement of air pollution.

Last year, the government of India launched an Air Quality Index (AQI) to better communicate air pollution levels to citizens. An AQI reduces the complex problem of air pollution to a single number that can be understood easily by a layperson. There are eight sub-indices that monitor level of a specific pollutant: PM10, PM2.5, nitrogen dioxide (NO2), sulphur dioxide, ozone, carbon monoxide, ammonia and lead. Based on the concentration of each pollutant, a sub-index is calculated for each. The worst sub-index determines the overall AQI. For instance, if the worst sub-index value for a particular locality is for NO2, then this number will be communicated as the AQI value for that particular day.

Particulate matter (PM) is widely acknowledged as the most serious problem in Indian cities. PM is the most harmful to human health, and real time air quality bulletins from Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) also show particulate matter as the predominant pollutant in almost all the Indian cities.

Mint looked at city-wise particulate matter data from 1990 onward from CPCB. In the 1990s, particulate matter data was recorded in the form of suspended particulate matter (SPM). By the early 2000s, with the advent of more sophisticated machines that could measure even smaller particles, CPCB started releasing this data in the form of respirable suspended particulate matter (RSPM), a subset of SPM. This gave way to PM10, or particulate matter whose diameter was smaller than 10 microns. From March 2015 onwards, CPCB moved towards actively measuring PM2.5 (particulate matter whose diameter was smaller than 2.5 microns) at most of its monitoring stations. The average diameter of human hair is 75 microns. This comparison gives us an idea about how small PM 2.5 is.

What is the state of pollution in India’s different cities? To compare air pollution across cities, Mint picked up the top 5 cleanest and dirtiest cities for every year between 2007 and 2015. We then narrowed down our selection to the cities that had featured the greatest number of times out of this list, thus ensuring that we picked those cities that had consistently been in the top 5 cleanest or dirtiest cities over this period. Statistics for PM 10 levels from 2007 onwards show that cities in southern part of the country have much cleaner air than those in the north.

Cities like Ghaziabad, Allahabad, and Raipur recorded much worse PM 10 levels than Delhi in the last decade. The north-south divide manifests itself in data going back to the 1990s as well.

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Livemint.com, 29 December, 2016, http://www.livemint.com/Home-Page/9z5ZqUvynqm60NPZ6uN1aJ/Indias-air-pollution-discourse-needs-to-move-beyond-Delhi.html


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