India plans stricter quality standards to tackle air pollution

In order to tackle increasing air pollution in the county, the Centre 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 Union government also plans to install 1,000 more air monitoring stations, especially in cities with a population of over 100,000. At present, there are 1,504 air monitoring stations in 543 cities across the country.

The government has entrusted the job of updating NAAQS to IIT Kanpur, which has set up a panel comprising experts from the World Health Organisation (WHO) and other institutions.

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“Work on the new NAAQS is ongoing. We have given the project to IIT Kanpur, and the new standards will be notified soon. Currently, we have 12 parameters; there could be some additions and some changes in permissible limits," one of the two officials said on the condition of anonymity.

“When we talk about exposure, particulate matter (PM) 2.5 keeps coming to the conversation. Here, natural resources have a contribution of 40-50% to PM2.5 and 10. Other developed nations have a problem of sulfur dioxide (So2); they don’t talk about PM2.5 and its weightage is less. In India, our issue is population and our ranking is low. All these affect human health. We have raised the concern to Niti Aayog."

India ranked as the third most polluted country in 2023, after Bangladesh and Pakistan, according to World Air Quality Report 2023 by Swiss air quality monitoring body, IQAir.

Air quality monitoring

The air quality standards are meant to protect public health from exposure to six air pollutants: Particulate matters, ozone, nitrogen oxides, sulfur oxides, carbon monoxide and lead.

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The country's apex pollution watchdog, Central Pollution Control Board, sets up air pollution monitoring devices to collect, compile and disseminate information on air quality.

The CPCB has a network of 963 manual monitoring devices under the National Ambient Air Quality Monitoring Programme (NAMP) and 543 real-time monitoring devices under the Continuous Ambient Air Quality Monitoring System (CAAQMS), according to the second official.

The 1,000 new monitoring devices will be manual, the official said.

Queries sent to the spokesperson and the secretary of the ministry of environment, forest 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 is right now to make sure the existing standards are met. We are not meeting any standards by a wide margin," said Chandra Bhushan, founder and chief executive of the International Forum for Environment, Sustainability and Technology (iForest).

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“If you reduce particulate matter, or sulphur, nitrogen, ozone, benzene, it has a huge benefit on health. We should be able to monitor existing pollutants well and have an action plan for them," Bhushan added.

Outdoor air pollution accounts for 2.18 million deaths per year in India, second only to China (2.44 million), according to a modelling study published in The BMJ, a weekly peer-reviewed medical journal published by BMJ Group, in November 2023.