Air Quality

It is a death no one will mourn. The Commission For Air Quality Management (CAQM) in the National Capital Region, created by an ordinance promulgated on October 28th,2020 — in fact  a super commission  that on paper subsumed all the other bodies involved in maintaining air quality in the NCR — was quietly disbanded, as the Ordinance lapsed. No bill to implement it was even introduced, let alone passed during the Parliament’s 2021 budget session. According to Press Trust of India, Union Environment Secretary R P Gupta said that since the ordinance was not introduced in Parliament within six weeks…

The approaching festival of lights was beginning to bring people out shopping to CP, Sarojini Nagar, Lajpat Nagar and every other market. But alarm bells started ringing when the daily COVID figures crossed the 6000 mark on November 3rd and stayed that way for the next few days. Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal suspected it could be a third wave of the deadly virus. The timing was particularly worrisome. It was a double whammy, dampening the festival spirit and raising fears of poor air quality accelerating the spread of COVID-19 spread and its effects. The number of cases in the capital has surged again. Hospitals are…

The National Clean Air Programme (NCAP) was announced in 2018 and the draft was accepted in 2019. The programme is designed to build institutional capacity and initiate studies to better understand the pollution load in cities.  122 cities from 20 states and 3 union territories were declared “non-attainment” cities, based on the observed particulate matter pollution trends from the national ambient monitoring program (NAMP).  These cities were required to submit action plans outlining how to achieve 20-30% reduction in the ambient PM 2.5 levels by 2024, when compared to 2017. As of May 2020, there are 102 approved action plans.…

Few citizens in Mumbai are seen wearing a mask outdoors; fewer are actively concerned about air pollution. “It’s not as bad as Delhi”, most say, and inevitably point to the winds that blow from the surrounding sea. The murky, grey and polluted water might make them reconsider their statement, but the feeling that Mumbai is better than the northern landlocked cities wins. But when winter arrived last year, the sea winds failed Mumbai. In the month of December, temperatures dropped in the city but pollutants remained trapped in the atmosphere. The overall air quality index (AQI) was reported to be…

Kolkata-based cyber security expert and entrepreneur Niraj Agarwal is among the 13 candidates who are in the fray for the Kolkata South Lok Sabha constituency that goes to polls on May 19th. But there is one key difference between him and the 12 others. Far removed from the high decibel political campaign of his chief rivals, Niraj is quietly stirring a movement on one of the most important pressing issues of his constituency and of cities in general, but which hardly finds mention in political circles. In an exclusive tete-e-tete with Citizen Matters, this independent candidate says that the real…

Once again it’s that time of the year when we are most prone to looking back and ahead at the same time. Taking stock of the year’s discourse on urbanisation in India, it is evident that some issues have consistently dominated the narrative and been on top of the minds of urban citizens in 2017. These are also issues that we need to sustain focus upon as we move into the new year, since they will continue to play an important role in determining the dynamics and direction of development in the country, and in particular in its cities. As…

The first ten days of November 2017 has seen a furious and unprecedented level of dialogue and mainstream-media conversation around the topic of air quality, specifically in and about the city of New Delhi. While the situation in the national capital is indeed dire, a large part of that conversation has been aided by citizens, journalists and community activism groups having access to scientifically validated real-time, hourly-updated data of the air quality levels in their neighborhoods and surrounding areas. The conversation around air quality levels for several years primarily involved scientists and researchers from leading Indian institutes and a few…