Monitoring the air pollution

What is the issue?

India needs context-specific solutions to tackle the problem of monitoring the air pollution.

What are the steps taken until now?

• About 250 continuous & 800 ambient air quality monitoring stations are operating across the country.
• Budget allocation for air pollution was increased significantly in 2020-21 to ensure cleaner air in million plus cities.
• Commission for Air Quality Management was established which penalises the polluters in the NCR.
• India has jumped from BSIV to BSVI vehicles & now the focus is shifted towards e-mobility.
• Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana has increased the LPG coverage in rural areas which has reduced indoor air pollution.

What are the innovations under the process to have cleaner air?

• Many institutions are involved in the process of developing solutions to combat the air pollution.
•  Indian Agricultural Research Institute has developed PUSA Bio Decomposer which converts crop residue into manure in 15-20 days.

• This could be a cost-effective alternative to tackle stubble burning.
• UNDP promotes start-up led innovations like filter-less retrofit device to cut down the particulate matter at source level.
• Breathing root technology is developed to improve indoor air quality by purifying the air.
• UNDP & the University of Nottingham has developed GeoAI platform to identify non-complaint brick kilns.
• The platform has mapped over 37,000 brick manufacturing units across the Indo-Gangetic plains.

What more needs to be done?

• Government needs to support the enterprises to come up with scalable pollution abatement technologies.
• A single window online platform needs to be developed to showcase innovations to mitigate air pollution.
• This can be done by leveraging digital technologies such as geospatial technology and AI.
• More resources need to be allocated to support test, certify & scale innovative solutions & to protect intellectual property rights.
• Private sector needs to innovate their operations, functioning & build emission and pollution controls to reduce carbon footprint.
• They also have the potential to develop commercially viable products to combat air pollution.
• An enabling ecosystem for innovations has to be created to address context-specific air pollution challenges.
• This can be done using the technological, economic, social, legal, educational, political & institutional domains.

Source: The Hindu