NEW DELHI: Efforts to reduce air pollution across the country—particulate matter PM2.5, which is 25 times thinner than human hair—in both urban and rural areas are producing results, though not at the pace they were intended.
But first, it’s important to address one misconception. Air pollution is largely considered an urban problem though data shows both cities and villages are equally polluting. As a result, rural areas don’t get the attention they deserve, leading to huge disparities in mitigation policy and resource allocations.
Major sources of high PM2.5 in rural areas are solid fuel for cooking, lighting and heating. The 78th round of the National Sample Survey captured in the Multiple Indicator Survey reports shows that over 50% of rural households do not use clean sources of energy for cooking.
It raises questions over the effectiveness of the Centre’s flagship scheme, Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana, under which over 9.58 crore households received LPG cylinders.
In comparison, the major sources of PM2.5 in urban areas are vehicular emission, industrial emission, road dust, biomass, garbage burning and coal and diesel combustion. PM2.5 is known to cause a range of health problems in different age groups, such as premature mortality, chronic bronchitis and asthma attacks.
Positive outcome
India launched the National Clean Air Programme (NCAP) in 2019 to reduce particulate concentrations by 20-30% by 2024. The programme involves comprehensive planning to reduce ambient air pollution within specific time frames. The efforts yielded results as satellite data from IIT-Delhi shows that PM2.5 levels in rural and urban regions across India witnessed a decline between 2017 and 2022. Rural regions witnessed a decline of 19.1%, while in urban areas it dipped by 18.7%.
Data shows that rural areas saw a higher drop in PM2.5 levels than urban regions. Besides, Northern and Eastern regions performed better in reducing pollutant levels than Southern and Western regions. In urban areas, the West witnessed a 10.6% decline while the drop in the East was as much as 20.4%. Similarly, in rural regions, there was an 11% reduction in the West as compared to the East’s 22.5%.
India’s most polluted region, the Indo-Gangetic Plain, performed far better than other regions. The reduction in PM2.5 levels in rural regions of the Indo-Gangetic Plain is 17.1 ug/m3 as compared to 9.3 ug/m3 in other regions. The trend is similar in urban regions too.
In the same period, Uttar Pradesh performed the best in both rural and urban areas while Maharashtra was the worst-performing state in both regions. Gujarat made the least progress. And Chandigarh was the only place that witnessed an increase in PM2.5 levels.
“This analysis clearly indicates India is inching towards plateauing its upward rising air pollution levels since 2016-2017,” said Sagnik Dey, Professor, Centre for Atmospheric Sciences, IIT, Delhi. “This is a positive achievement. However, the challenge lies in bringing the needle down further, especially as we are in the last year of the NCAP’s targets of reducing 20-30% particulate matter levels by 2024,” she added.
Worryingly, urban regions in only 14 states and rural areas in 12 states had brought down their pollutant levels to safe limits set by the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB), which is 40 ug/m3. CPCB’s safety benchmark is completely different from that of the World Health Organisation. WHO prescribes 5 ug/m3 – eight times lower than CPCB’s benchmark of safe limit.
“When we are analysing long-term PM2.5 trends on the basis of the last six years from 2017 to 2022, we should not worry about annual fluctuations in some places,” said Prof S N Tripathi, who is in the civil engineering department of the IIT, Kanpur and is a Steering Committee Member of the National Clean Air Programme (NCAP), Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change.
Poor monitoring density
One major lacunae of the NCAP is that most of its monitoring network is concentrated in cities. A new analysis done by Climate Trends highlights the need to address air pollution more comprehensively.
India has two monitoring networks, CAAQMS (Continuous Ambient Air Quality Monitoring Stations) and NAMP (National Air Pollution Monitoring Programme). Many cities still use only one station to measure air quality, primarily in urban areas, whereas big cities like the Delhi-NCR monitor ambient air quality at multiple locations. For instance, Delhi measures air quality at 39 CAAQMS and six NAMP sites.
The monitoring network is growing by and by. Currently, CAAQMS has 400 monitoring stations while NAMP has over 800 in various places or cities. The monitoring network density is abysmally low compared to other countries. According to a study, India needs 4,000 monitoring networks.
A study published in 2019 stated, between 2010 and 2016, India’s monitoring density was 0.14/million population, which was well below that of countries like China (1.2), the US (3.4), Japan (0.5), Brazil (1.8) and EU (2-3).
