Greenpeace calls out govt for omitting 139 highly polluted towns and cities from its NCAP

NEW DELHI: As many as 139 towns and cities, where air pollution levels exceed national air quality standards, are not included in the National Clean Air Programme (NCAP) which was launched early this month as a pan-India strategy to tackle the menace, said Greenpeace India in an analysis report on Tuesday.
The NCAP is currently meant for 102 cities including Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Varanasi, Kanpur, Lucknow, Allahabad, Kolkata, Bengaluru, Chandigarh, Jaipur, Jammu, Patiala, Jalandhar, Ludhiana, Patna and Hyderabad among others.
The Centre under the NCAP has set a mid-term (5-year) target to reduce air pollution by 20-30% by 2024, taking 2017 as base year, in 102 non-attainment cities. A city which does not meet the national air quality standard is considered as a non-attainment city.
The Greenpeace India, however, in its analysis found that India has currently 241 cities\towns which do not meet the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS).
“The omission is due to the fact that the list of non-attainment cities in the NCAP was drawn together using data from the years 2011-2015,” said the environmental NGO which analysed air pollution data of 313 cities and towns for the year 2017.
Of these 313 cities, 241 (77%) had PM10 levels beyond the NAAQS. The NGO argued that the ongoing air pollution abatement measures under the NCAP should have, therefore, been carried out in all these 241 cities\towns instead of limiting it to only 102 cities.
“The NCAP has used limited data from 2015, and as a result, has omitted a large number of highly polluted cities. We are calling on the environment ministry to update the list with 2017 data to reduce air pollution in as many highly polluted cities as possible, to make this as ‘national’ a programme as possible and help us move towards a clean air nation,” said Sunil Dahiya, clean air campaigner of Greenpeace India.
Referring to the NCAP target, the report shows that even if the target of 30% air pollution reduction by 2024 is achieved, 153 cities across the country will still not even comply with the NAAQS, and only 12 cities will comply with WHO guidelines.
Giving an example, the report noted that even after a 30% reduction, the PM10 levels in Delhi will still be about 168 micrograms per cubic metre (µg/m3), almost three times the national standard of 60µg/m3.
Tackling pollution from various sources (power plants, transport, industry, residential and agriculture sectors), increasing number of manual air quality monitoring stations across the country, expanding network of the Continuous Ambient Air Quality Monitoring Stations (CAAQMS) and setting up of ‘Air Information Centre’ for data analysis, interpretation and dissemination through GIS platforms are among the key components of the NCAP.
On the basis of analysis of data for five years generated under the National Air Quality Monitoring Programme during 2011-15, the ministry had initially identified 94 cities as non-attainment cities. Later, eight more cities had been identified as polluted cities as per the WHO data base, making it a list of 102 cities.
The highest number of cities in the list of 102 is in Maharashtra (17) followed by Uttar Pradesh (15), Punjab (9), Himachal Pradesh (7), Odisha and Madhya Pradesh (6 each), Assam, Andhra Pradesh and Rajasthan (5 each), Karnataka (4), Bihar, Chhattisgarh and Telangana (3 each), Gujarat, J&K, Nagaland and Uttarakhand (2 each) and Jharkhand, Delhi, Chandigarh, Meghalaya, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal (1 each).