'Massive' awareness campaign in offing to check air pollution

The Government today said it will soon launch a "massive" people-oriented awareness campaign to check air pollution, and asserted that it has adopted a "consultative and cooperative" approach with the states to deal with the menace in and around Delhi.
Union Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar said that three review meetings held with the environment ministers of four states-- Rajasthan, Haryana, Delhi and Uttar Pradesh-- as well as officials of municipal bodies and police have got a "positive" response and states including Delhi have already taken a host of measures to tackle air pollution.
The three meetings were held this year on April 6, April 13 and July 24.

"The Government has been making consistent efforts to address the issue of air pollution in Delhi and National Capital Region (NCR). It has adopted a consultative and cooperative approach to tackle the air pollution in and around Delhi," Javadekar said.
He said that the "pro-active" approach of his Ministry has translated into setting up of short-term preventive measures like stopping the burning of bio-wastes, initiating work for major up-gradation of Pollution Under Control (PUC) system and issuing challans of over-loaded goods vehicles.
It also led to enhancing of parking slots availability, installation of waste to energy plants and strict monitoring of polluting industries, the Minister said.

"At the meeting held on July 24, it was decided that all the states concerned will come out with an annual plan of initiatives to prevent air pollution and also come out with a long-term plan.

"As pollution cannot be tackled only through government efforts, the Centre will soon launch a massive people-oriented awareness campaign to check air pollution," Javadekar said.
Elaborating about the initiatives taken up by Delhi, Environment Ministry officials said that the state has monitoring network of 20 stations and data has been available in public domain in one or other form.
It has been suggested that at least 20 continuous ambient air quality monitoring stations need to be setup in the NCR region to know the overall air quality in the region on real-time basis.