Delhi: 14 stations to monitor pollution on Diwali night, to update data real time

According to the official, the new stations have been installed in different areas — residential, industrial, hospitals, schools, colleges and stadiums — in order to give a true representative character of air pollution.

On Diwali night, 14 Delhi Pollution Control Committee stations will keep a hawk-eyed vigil on pollution across the city.

According to the official, the new stations have been installed in different areas — residential, industrial, hospitals, schools, colleges and stadiums — in order to give a true representative character of air pollution. (Raj K Raj/HT PHOTO)

“The stations include the four old monitoring stations at Anand Vihar, Punjabi Bagh, RK Puram and Mandir Marg. The new ones, which will be online by Diwali, are PGDAV College, Shrinivaspuri, Dr Karni Singh Shooting Range in Asola, Major Dhyan Chand National Stadium, Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium, ITI Jahangirpuri, DITE Wazirpur, DITE Okhla, Mother Dairy, Patparganj, Shaheed Sukhdev College of Business Studies and Satyawati College in Ashok Vihar,” a senior Delhi Pollution Control Committee official said.

The number of stations will be 19 by October 20 and will further be increased to 24 by the end of this month.

According to the official, the new stations have been installed in different areas — residential, industrial, hospitals, schools, colleges and stadiums — in order to give a true representative character of air pollution.

“As per international guidelines, the correct way to know one index for a city’s air quality is to consider different micro-environments… For a typical metro city, commercial; urban complex; sub-urban; residential; industrial; road side; traffic junction are the micro-environments that should be covered in the monitoring network,” a World Meteorological Organisation report says, regarding the need for monitoring different types of areas.

Air pollution data in the National Capital, before this, was monitored from 17 stations – four run by the DPCC, eight by the Met department and the remaining five by the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB).

In the National Capital Region, too, three stations will be monitoring pollution at Gurgaon, Faridabad and Rohtak. Apart from this, 13 more stations will come up by December-end in Haryana.

In Uttar Pradesh, two stations are already functioning in Noida and Ghaziabad. Another 10 will come up by November-end. In Rajasthan, two stations have come up in Alwar and Bharatpur.

A forecast released by the Union ministry of earth sciences on Monday stated that the air quality in Delhi this year will be directly proportional to firecrackers burst and vehicular emissions within city limits. The report said prevalent weather conditions will not allow polluted air from neighbouring states to reach Delhi until at least October 21. Emissions triggered within city limits will not disperse easily either.

The Environment Pollution Control Authority (EPCA) on Tuesday implemented a series of measures, such as imposing a ban on diesel generator sets and temporarily shutting down the Badarpur thermal power plant, to curb pollution levels in the national capital region during the winter.

The Supreme Court-mandated panel has warned that further steps, including effecting a fourfold hike in parking fees and shutting down polluting industries, will be implemented if the air quality degrades from ‘very poor’ to ‘severe’ in the coming days.