Modi launches easy to read air pollution index

Prime minister also announces measures to provide green clearances within 30 days

Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched India’s first-ever Air Quality Index at the inaugural of a two-day meeting with state forest ministers and officials here on Monday. The composite index, measuring several air pollutants, will initially be available for 10 cities, including Delhi and Mumbai.

The prime minister also released the standard terms of reference for environmental appraisal of projects which is expected to cut down time taken for clearances by six-12 months.

In a glitch, which officials said was being fixed and had happened due to sudden burden on the servers, the website providing the air pollution index crashed on the day of the launch.

The launch of the index was welcomed by environmental think tanks such as the Centre for Science and Environment. It said, “This much-awaited measure was needed to protect public health and catalyse pollution emergency measures in cities.”

The government plans to expand the monitoring mechanism across 66 cities, but it has not revealed any plan to take pollution-abatement action based on such an index. Governments in many countries use the index to put in place emergency measures when the index indicates a high-degree of risk to public health from spike in pollution levels. Some cities send advisories to schools to shut down, others shut down industrial activities temporarily while many others curtail the number of cars and vehicles on road.

The Union Environment and Forests Minister, Prakash Javadekar, said standards for construction-related dust would be brought out soon. Dust from construction is one of the key components of the overall pollution load in cities such as Delhi.

The index will measure eight pollutants in the air but will be reporting the data on a real-time basis for only the cities with automated pollutant measuring devices. For others, the data would be a week old — too old to help any immediate management. There are only about 40 automated pollution-measuring machines across India at the moment, the Central Pollution Control Board noted.

The index will permit citizens to easily find if there is a spike in any one or more of specific pollutants. The index website will also provide the degree of danger that the spike could cause to public health based on a simple colour coding.

The prime minister also launched the standard terms of reference for carrying out environmental impact assessment studies as part of the green clearances process. At present, the expert appraisal committee gives site and project specific terms of references for carrying out the impact assessment. Once the assessment is in and a public hearing held on its basis, the committee evaluates the project for the clearance.

Javadekar said the ‘Standard Terms of Reference’ for 39 industries, would bring down the time for granting approvals from six months to one year earlier to 30 days now.