How key to cleaner Delhi lies from Punjab to West Bengal

NEW DELHI: With two smog episodes already this month , Delhi has been in the news for all the wrong reasons. However, the national capital is not alone in its misery — Ghaziabad, Noida, Greater Noida and Jind have fared worse in the last two weeks (November 1-15). In fact, the problem is spread across the Indo-Gangetic Plain (IGP) region and experts say an airshed approach is required to tackle the problem if the NCAP target of a 25% reduction in PM2.5 levels by 2024 has to be met.

At a discussion organised by Climate Trends, a Delhi-based communications initiative, experts and pollution control boards sought better cooperation among states and greater focus on smaller towns where higher emissions may be going undetected. “The problem of high pollution in Delhi was not as prevalent in the winters a decade ago because background emissions from neighbouring towns and cities were not that high. This has, however, grown a lot and is going unchecked. One needs to treat the entire Indo-Gangetic Plain as one expansive area; plans need to be in place for not just one city alone,” Dr Sagnik Dey, associate professor at IIT-Delhi and coordinator for the Centre for Excellence for Research for Clean Air, said.

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Dey said there were gaps in data that were not allowing comprehensive action to be taken on the ground. “We live in the age of data and, yet, there is no air pollution figures for the entire rural India. To address the problem of air pollution comprehensively, we need to delineate ‘airsheds’ based on wind flows in the regions and their pollutant reach. While city action plans have been submitted, these should be integrated with the larger airshed management strategy to make an effective plan,” Dey said.

A 2012 study by IIT-Delhi mapped the aerosol transfer across Indo-Gangetic belt, finding it to be world’s most polluted hotspot — stretching from Punjab, Haryana, Delhi, UP and Bihar to all the way to West Bengal. Experts say the entire belt has a complex set of topographical and meteorological conditions that produce a landlocked valley effect.

Data analysed by Urban Sciences across 26 cities in Indo-Gangetic Plain from November 1-15 showed Ghaziabad to be the most polluted. There were five cities from Haryana too that experts say are missing from the NCAP list of 102+20 cities. Ronak Sutaria, CEO at Urban Sciences says there’s a need to scale up monitoring across the region. Dr Ravindra Khaiwal, additional professor, School of Public Health, PGIMER Chandigarh, suggested incentivising people to cut down on pollution levels.