To tackle the region's rising air pollution, the center plans to introduce stricter national ambient air quality standards (NAAQS), which have not been revised since 2009, according to two officials close to the matter.
The government also plans to install 1,000 additional air monitoring stations, especially in cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants. Currently, there are 1,504 air monitoring stations in 543 cities in the country.
The government has entrusted the task of updating the NAAQS to IIT Kanpur, which has constituted a panel of experts from the World Health Organization (WHO) and other institutions.
“Work on the new NAAQS is going on. We have given the project to IIT Kanpur and the new norms will be notified soon. Currently we have 12 parameters; there may be some additions and some changes in permissible limits,” one of the two officials said on condition of anonymity.
“When we talk about exposure, particulate matter (PM) 2.5 keeps coming up. Here, natural resources contribute 40-50% to PM2.5 and 10. Other developed countries have a problem with sulphur dioxide (SO2); they don't talk about PM2.5 and its weight is less. In India, our problem is population and our ranking is low. All these things affect human health. We have raised the concern with Niti Aayog.”
According to the World Air Quality Report 2023 by the Swiss air quality monitoring body IQAir, India will be the third most polluted country in 2023 after Bangladesh and Pakistan.
Air quality monitoring
The air quality standards are intended to protect public health from exposure to six air pollutants: particulate matter, ozone, nitrogen oxides, sulfur oxides, carbon monoxide and lead.
The country's top pollution watchdog, the Central Pollution Control Board, is installing air pollution monitoring equipment to collect, compile and disseminate information on air quality.
According to the second official, the CPCB has a network of 963 manual measuring devices under the National Ambient Air Quality Monitoring Programme (NAMP) and 543 real-time measuring devices under the Continuous Ambient Air Quality Monitoring System (CAAQMS).
The official said the 1,000 new control devices will be manual.
Questions sent to the spokesperson and secretary of the Ministry of Environment, Forestry and Climate Change and the chairman of the CPCB remained unanswered.
“I don't think there is a need to revise the standards. The need now is to ensure that the existing standards are being met. We are far from meeting any standard,” said Chandra Bhushan, founder and CEO of the International Forum for Environment, Sustainability and Technology (iForest).
“If you reduce particulate matter, or sulphur, nitrogen, ozone, benzene, it has a huge health benefit. We should be able to monitor existing pollutants properly and have an action plan for them,” Bhushan added.
According to a modelling study published in 2014, outdoor air pollution is responsible for 2.18 million deaths per year in India, second only to China (2.44 million). The BMJa weekly peer-reviewed medical journal published by BMJ Group, in November 2023.
