TimesView Air quality degrades every year after the festive season. Polluting vehicles push up the AQI level even further. The administration should immediately act against ill-maintained vehicles and citizens should do their bit to keep the pollution levels at check.

KOLKATA: For 72 hours now, Kolkata’s air quality index (AQI) has been worse than Delhi’s, making it the most polluted metro in the country. With the vehicle count in Kolkata barely a fourth of Delhi, the index may seem baffling. Environmentalists say it is a result of proactiveness to improve air quality in Delhi and complacency in Kolkata that has led to this unhappy situation.A comparison of the pollution data at two stations in Kolkata — Rabindra Bharati University and Victoria Memorial Hall — with Ashok Vihar, one of the worst polluted zones in Delhi, shows that Kolkata’s AQI has consistently been above that of Delhi. There are 19 automatic stations in Delhi to monitor the city’s air quality against only two in Kolkata.Environmentalists say the data from the station at RBU on BT Road is representative of Kolkata’s air quality while that from Victoria memorial Hall ensconced in a green zone in a non-residential Maidan area represents the best possible air quality in the city. Kolkata’s air routinely gets toxic during winter when inversion of temperature traps finer particulate matter closer to the ground, leading to adverse health effects.Lack of cleaner fuel plagues KolAuto emission expert Somendra Mohan Ghosh said: “While Delhi goes with odd-even experiment (running vehicle with odd registration number on one day and even registration number the next), Kolkata has chosen to sit tight and ignore the issue. Worse, it has over the years turned into a diesel vehicle capital with more vehicles running on the fuel that is dirtier than petrol.”While the rest of India is aggressively experimenting with mixing bio-fuel with diesel to bring down particulate pollution, Kolkata has so far done nothing noteworthy. CTC, a state-owned transport operator in Kolkata, was the first PSU in the country to adopt bio-diesel experiment for its bus fleet. But for reasons unknown, it stopped using the greener fuel.The non-availability of cleaner fuel in Kolkata is another reason why the city has turned from bad to worse. Delhi’s public transport runs on CNG while 70% of Kolakta’s fleet runs on diesel. That makes a huge difference. I have been calling for the need to make CNG available in Kolkata urgently but there is no such urgency on the part of the administration. No attempt has been made to bring coal-bed methane (CBM), a cleaner natural gas available in Asansol, to the city,” said environment crucader Subhas Dutta, whose PILs led to a ban on 15-year-old commercial vehicles and rehaul of the autorickshaw fleet from petrol to LPG.What bothers environmentalists most is the poor surveillance on automobile pollution.