Anti-smog tower at Connaught Place restarted day after Supreme Court rebuke

Delhi’s air quality index was in severe category on Wednesday with an air quality index of 425 being recorded at 1 pm by the Central Pollution Control Board.

NEW DELHI: A team of Delhi Pollution Control Committee (DPCC) officials on Wednesday restarted the non-functional anti-smog tower in Connaught Place on Wednesday morning, a day after the Supreme Court ordered the administration to immediately operationalise the tower.

Officials from the technical team of Delhi Pollution Control Committee re-starts on the anti-smog tower on Baba Kharak Singh Marg in Connaught Place (Hindustan Times/Sanchit Khanna)

A member of the team said that the plant has been re-operationalized as per the direction of the Supreme Court and the clean-up work of equipment and rooms was being carried out. “The facility was shut down in April. All the fans are now functional and trials are being carried out. We will gradually increase the speed of fans,” the official said.

The DPCC did not immediately respond to requests for a comment.

Delhi’s air quality index was in severe category on Wednesday with an air quality index of 425 being recorded at 1 pm by the Central Pollution Control Board.

On Tuesday, the bench of justices Sanjay Kishan Kaul and Sudhanshu Dhulia said, “We want this tower to be working,” and added, “We direct the chairperson of DPCC to remain personally present in court on the next date.” The court, while dealing with the issue of air pollution in Delhi, was informed by amicus curiae and senior advocate Aparajita Singh that the smog tower, inaugurated in August 2021, was not operational for some time. The court noted that disciplinary action has also been proposed against the chairman of DPCC.

As DPCC officials were trying to operationalize the tower on Wednesday morning, Delhi environment minister Gopal Rai recalled that the pollution control body hadn’t acted on the government’s request to do the same.

“We had written to CM and LG regarding the anti-smog tower and real-time source apportionment study being stopped. Disciplinary action must be taken in this case. The smog tower was set up as per the Supreme Court order but neither the court nor the cabinet was informed before closing it,” he added.

On November 4 also, Rai blamed DPCC chairman for arbitrarily shutting down the tower over unpaid dues to IIT and sought the bureaucrat’s suspension “for not implementing the decision of the council of ministers, arbitrarily stopping payment of Rs2 crore to IIT Kanpur that brought the source apportionment study to a halt and for acting upon unsubstantiated personal opinions.”

The anti-smog tower was installed following a Supreme Court order on January 13, 2020. The Delhi cabinet formally decided on October 9, 2020, that the unit would be installed as a pilot project for two years. The tower was opened by chief minister Arvind Kejriwal in August 2021

Rai said that IIT Mumbai and IIT Delhi submitted a half-yearly report which stated that the tower was effective in 500 metres radius and the study was going on. “Using his powers, the DPCC chairman went against Supreme Court order and stopped the payment for the study of smog tower...Following this, the agencies stopped the study and the smog tower was shut,” Rai had said.

Experts have long argued that smog towers are not a long-term solution to Delhi’s air pollution problem, and that not only would people have to remain extremely close to the smog tower to breathe clean air, but thousands of such smog towers would have to be installed all across the city to bring about a change in air quality.