NEW DELHI: Nongstoin is the cleanest town in the country with the least polluting matter in its air.
However, it is still higher than the annual mean safe level recommended by the World Health Organisation, a Greenpeace India report said.
The air quality in India’s cleanest towns does not meet the World Health Organisation standards, according to the report.
With an annual reading of 26 µg/m3, the temple town of Hassan in Karnataka, hilly Pathanamthitta in Kerala and Nongstoin have the least particulate matter in air.
But these are still higher than the 20 µg/m3 annual mean safe level recommended by WHO, the Greenpeace India report said.
Following these cities are Darjeeling (29) in West Bengal and Tura (30) in Meghalaya, according to the 2016 data available for 280 cities.
Delhi was the most polluted with an annual PM10 average of 290, which is close to five times the permissible limit.
Delhi is followed by Faridabad in Haryana (272), Bhiwadi in Rajasthan (262), Patna in Bihar (261), and Dehradun in Uttarakhand (238).
Around 550 million people live in places where PM10 exceeds the standards with 180 million of them living in areas with PM10 double the permissible standards.
The study found that 228 cities and towns — 80% of the places surveyed — exceeded the annual permissible concentration of PM10 of 60 microgram/m3 set by the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS).
Thirteen of the 20 most polluted cities are in India, according to the WHO’s Global Urban Ambient Air Pollution Database 2014.
Moreover, the air quality data is available for only 53 per cent of India’s population, that too if it is assumed that one monitoring station is enough to actually give reliable figures for an entire district or city.
“The government has no air quality data for areas where 580 million Indians live, including 59 million children under the age of five, who are at an increased risk of developing chronic respiratory problems,” said the Greenpeace report that also blamed the Centre for not having time-bound plans to tackle pollution.
“Apart from Delhi-NCR, where a Graded Response Action Plan (GRAP) has come into force, no other city seems to be taking any action of any worth against the polluters,” the report said.
Ministry sources said it is in the process of launching the National Clean Action Plan, under which source apportionment studies will be done in nearly 100 cities where the pollution is high.
The report sourced data from 87 Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) stations and 683 monitoring stations which record the numbers manually across 300 towns.
The challenge with manual stations is that it can be tampered with and very few record daily data.
The CPCB runs 87 real-time automated air quality monitoring stations for a population of 1.3 billion; only 11 more than Taiwan, which has a population of 23.5 million. The rest of the stations are run by district pollution control committees.
Since the monitoring stations are few and far between in remote areas, the annual average data are often not representative of the entire district.
