Centre taking all steps possible to combat air pollution in Delhi, North India

Union Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar on Monday said the Centre has been taking all steps possible to combat air pollution in Delhi and North India and is working towards deploying technological interventions towards that. Speaking at the 4th Roundtable Consultation on 'Clearing the Air -Driving central and state-level actions' jointly hosted by The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) and Air Quality Asia, an international air quality advocacy group, Javadekar said Prime Minister Narendra Modi has put a firm resolve to improve the air quality of 100 cities in the next five years. "The Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change through its National Clean Air Programme, which is a city specific plan, is working in that direction with a target to achieve 20 to 30 per cent reduction in PM10 and PM2.5 concentrations by 2024," he said at the virtual interaction.

Speaking on the peculiar nature of air pollution in northern India, especially Delhi-NCR, the minister said, "The crisis of air pollution can be attributed to primary factors like industrial emissions, vehicular emissions, dust from construction and demolition sites, stubble burning for around 50-60 days in a year, biomass burning and poor legacy waste management." On the role of meteorology and geography, he said that though Delhi, Mumbai, Bangaluru and Chennai have similar population load and similar industrial and vehicular pollution levels. "But air quality index (AQI) in Delhi has shot up to over 300 in the last few days while in Chennai it is only 29, in Mumbai it is 140 and in Bangaluru it is 45. This is due to the meteorological factors which we must appreciate and therefore when the wind speed and meteorology is unfavourable we must make more efforts to better air quality," he said.