CHENNAI: The draft National Clean Air Programme (NCAP) is a step in the right direction, but highly inept to combat the extent of air pollution in the country, said Kankana Das from EIA Resource & Response Centre (eRc) on Saturday.
Speaking at an event here, she said that even if government installs air quality monitoring stations in 300 cities, as proposed by the NCAP, only 600 out of 4,000 cities would be monitored.
“Even within this scope, it is not clear as which cities will be chosen or on what basis they will be picked,” she said adding that manual monitoring stations will not be able to produce real-time ambient data. She added that while the government is ambitious in its plan to expand its air quality monitoring system, the data collected by private stakeholders in industrial areas, have remained out of public domain. “We may be able to tackle air pollution in rural areas in a better way if we have direct data from industrial pollution. This is because most industries are built in rural areas,” she said.
She further added that one of the largest corrective measures proposed in NCAP is a large-scale plantation drive. She, however, claimed that the programme has no funds for such a project. There is no scientific approach to the plantation drive. There is no species or site selection, she said.