BENGALURU: While there are several research institutes in the country working on the issue of air pollution, many of them work in silos, with their published papers or scientific evidence getting overlooked by the government during policy-making. This is something Centre for Air Pollution Studies (CAPS) wants to change, said Dr Pratima Singh, the domain lead of the newly-launched centre.
“We will keep our data, scientific evidence and research on an open platform so other researchers can access it and even collaborate with us. The idea is to feed this research into the National Clean Air Programme launched by the Centre earlier this year, for which 102 non-attainment cities have to submit their plan to combat air pollution,” said Singh.
CAPS, launched by city-based think tank, CSTEP (Center for Study of Science, Technology and Policy), will undertake mobile and stationary monitoring of air pollution, and creation of emission inventory to understand the sources of emission, duration of fuel use, etc.
It will also include source apportionment studies to calculate pollutants from each source. “PM (particulate matter) 2.5, for example, includes lead from cement, aluminium, arsenic and 28 to 32 other elements that enter our bloodstream when we breathe the polluted air. We need to know how much element is present in PM 2.5. As there is no infrastructure available for conducting location-specific estimates, we will need to work with computational models to forecast air pollution,” Singh added.
She added that a common person will not know what particulate matter means. “We want to create a framework to make such terms understandable,” she said.