(This story originally appeared in on Nov 27, 2018)

NEW DELHI: The Centre has fixed a target of reducing air pollution by 20-30% from the current level in 102 cities across the country by 2024. The target is part of the environment ministry’s National Clean Air Programme (NCAP) which is to be released in the next few days.Besides Delhi, the cities in the list include Mumbai Pune , Varanasi, Kanpur, Lucknow, Allahabad, Kolkata, Bengaluru, Chandigarh , Jaipur, Jammu, Patiala, Jalandhar , Ludhiana, Patna and Hyderabad among others.The main components of the NCAP include city specific air pollution abatement action plans for all non-attainment cities, similar to the comprehensive action plan for Delhi, carrying details of specific time-bound actions and emergency measures such as graded response action plan (GRAP) on the basis of Air Quality Index (AQI).A non-attainment city is considered to have air quality worse than the National Ambient Air Quality Standards. The national move is aimed at addressing the problem of air pollution in all cities facing air pollution beyond the headline-grabbing Delhi-NCR.“Overall objective of the NCAP is comprehensive management plan for prevention, control and abatement of air pollution besides augmenting the air quality monitoring network across the country,” said additional secretary in environment ministry, A K Jain.The programme will focus on “collaborative and participatory approach” covering all sources of pollution (power plants, transport, industry, residential and agriculture sectors) and coordination between relevant central ministries, state governments, local bodies and other stakeholders.“The NCAP will formally be released by Union environment minister Harsh Vardhan before he heads for the upcoming UN climate conference in Katowice, Poland beginning December 2,” said a senior official, referring to what transpired during a round-table on the programme here on Monday.The round-table was meant to discuss the national plan with various Indian and international organisations on their engagements in combating air pollution and their current and future roles.The ministry has already finalised a deal with various global agencies, including World Bank, German development agency (GIZ) and Asian Development Bank (ADB), to build capacities of all 102 polluting cities. Besides officials from these agencies, senior representatives of Germany, Mexico, Switzerland and Japan also attended the ministry’s round-table on NCAP.Tackling pollution from various sources, increasing number of manual air quality monitoring stations from over 700 to 1,000 stations in India, expanding network of the Continuous Ambient Air Quality Monitoring Stations and setting up of Air Information Centre for data analysis, interpretation and dissemination through GIS platforms are among the key plans of the NCAP.