Regional plan needed to solve pollution crisis in Indo-Gangetic belt

New Delhi: Not just the national Capital region but all cities in the Indo-Gangetic belt need a common plan to escape the yearly episodes of peak pollution during

New Delhi: Not just the national Capital region but all cities in the Indo-Gangetic belt need a common plan to escape the yearly episodes of peak pollution during winters. Delhi cannot solve its pollution crisis without regional cooperation. A regional framework from the perspective of all cities in this belt is required to meet the target of reduction of 20%-30% in pollution levels under the National Clean Air Program (NCAP), said experts.

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Experts said that the Indo-Gangetic Plains (IGP) have a complex set of topographical and meteorological conditions that produce a land-locked valley effect, hence allowing pollutants to accumulate.

“While city action plans have been prepared, they should be linked with a larger ‘airshed’ management strategy – identifying regions where action is needed based on wind direction – to cut down on the peak pollution episodes in the whole of IGP,” said Sagnik Dey, associate professor, Centre for Atmospheric Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology-Delhi, during a workshop on regional cooperation for dealing with air quality crisis, on Monday.

He said the entire NCAP rests on Central and state pollution control boards for controlling air pollution, however, their capacity and resources need to be evaluated and reinforced.

“Also, source-apportionment studies conducted previously point strongly to regional cooperation. Unless central, state and municipal bodies work in tandem and action plans for all cities are linked, we will return to such kind of spikes in pollution each year,” said Dey, who is also the coordinator of IIT-Delhi’s Centre of Excellence for Research on Clean Air (CERCA).

The national capital witnessed two peak smog episodes over the past few weeks, with air quality reaching the upper end of the ‘severe’ category each time. The first episode was on November 3-4, when the city was enveloped in a dense layer of smog. On November 3, Delhi saw its worst air day since 2016, when the air quality index (AQI) had spiraled to 494.

The second peak, during November 12 -15, was longer when pollution levels remained in the ‘severe’ zone for more than 86 hours in a row.

However, data analysis from November 1-5 this year across 26 cities in the IGP, conducted by Urban Sciences, a Mumbai-based startup that develops low-cost air quality monitoring sensors, showed that four cities – including the satellite towns of Ghaziabad, Noida , Greater Noida – were the most polluted followed by Jind (in Haryana), while Delhi ranked fifth on the list.

“There is a need for increasing the number of monitoring stations in cities outside of Delhi to assess the pollution levels and their impact thereof,” said, Ronak Sutaria, chief executive officer, Urban Sciences.

Also, the common plan must include action taken to curb emissions from crop stubble burning in upwind states of Haryana and Punjab. “The farmer is the first victim and rural areas are severely affected with health issues, as we see in our visits to hotspots of stubble burning. A common approach is needed to tackle this situation,” said Dr Ravindra Khaiwal, additional professor, School of Public Health, PGIMER Chandigarh.

All cities falling in the IGP, including Meerut, Kanpur, Varanasi, among others, are severely polluted due to accumulation of pollutants from various sources during the winter.

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