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On 10 January, Environment Minister Harsh Vardhan launched the National Clean Air Programme (NCAP), aimed at tackling the growing problem of air pollution in the country. The five-year programme, which will begin this year and has a corpus of Rs 300 crore, will be implemented in 102 Indian cities. It aims to reduce PM2.5 and PM10 concentration by 20-30% by 2024. “Overall objective of the NCAP is comprehensive mitigation actions for prevention, control and abatement of air pollution besides augmenting the air quality monitoring network across the country and strengthening the awareness and capacity building activities,” Harsh Vardhan said when the initiative was launched. But climate activists say that the plan is unlikely to make much difference to the abysmal air quality in many Indian cities. The reason, according to a Greenpeace report, is that the government used outdated numbers to arrive at the list, understating the magnitude of the problem. While the programme aims to reduce pollution levels by 20-30% from 2017, Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change used data from 2011-2015 to decide which cities it would be implemented in. According to the report, titled Airpocalypse III, almost half the cities in India that violate air pollution norms have been left out of the list.

Left out The report says that 2017 air pollution data for 313 cities and towns showed that 77% of them (241 cities) had PM10 levels beyond the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) prescribed by the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB). “It would have made more sense if the NCAP was based on data from 2017. Then it could have included all the cities that we found to have poor air pollution levels. All the 241 cities that we found to have high levels of pollution belong on the list of ‘non-attainment’ cities where action is required,” Sunil Dahiya, a Greenpeace campaigner and the report’s author, told HuffPost India over the phone. ‘Non-attainment’ list refers to the list of 102 cities were NCAP will be implemented—this count leaves out at least 139 cities where Greenpeace India found high air pollution levels, including Meerut, Ranchi and Jabalpur. Each winter, while most news stories focus on the air quality in Delhi, much of northern India is covered in a thick layer of smog. The NCAP’s list includes many problem cities like Chandigarh, Varanasi, Kolkata, Gaya and Patna but leaves out others. The infrastructure to monitor air pollution, said Dahiya, is also lacking in many places. “Uttar Pradesh has 75 districts. We found air pollution data for only 22 districts in the state from 2017. If there was infrastructure to measure air pollution in the other 50 odd districts, then it would tell a different story.”

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