What is the issue?
India needs context-specific solutions to tackle the problem of monitoring the air pollution.
What are the steps taken until now?
- About 250 continuous & 800 ambient air quality monitoring stations are operating across the country.
- Budget allocation for air pollution was increased significantly in 2020-21 to ensure cleaner air in million plus cities.
- Commission for Air Quality Management was established which penalises the polluters in the NCR.
- India has jumped from BSIV to BSVI vehicles & now the focus is shifted towards e-mobility.
- Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana has increased the LPG coverage in rural areas which has reduced indoor air pollution.
What are the innovations under the process to have cleaner air?
- Many institutions are involved in the process of developing solutions to combat the air pollution.
- Indian Agricultural Research Institute has developed PUSA Bio Decomposer which converts crop residue into manure in 15-20 days.
- This could be a cost-effective alternative to tackle stubble burning.
- UNDP promotes start-up led innovations like filter-less retrofit device to cut down the particulate matter at source level.
- Breathing root technology is developed to improve indoor air quality by purifying the air.
- UNDP & the University of Nottingham has developed GeoAI platform to identify non-complaint brick kilns.
- The platform has mapped over 37,000 brick manufacturing units across the Indo-Gangetic plains.
What more needs to be done?
- Government needs to support the enterprises to come up with scalable pollution abatement technologies.
- A single window online platform needs to be developed to showcase innovations to mitigate air pollution.
- This can be done by leveraging digital technologies such as geospatial technology and AI.
- More resources need to be allocated to support test, certify & scale innovative solutions & to protect intellectual property rights.
- Private sector needs to innovate their operations, functioning & build emission and pollution controls to reduce carbon footprint.
- They also have the potential to develop commercially viable products to combat air pollution.
- An enabling ecosystem for innovations has to be created to address context-specific air pollution challenges.
- This can be done using the technological, economic, social, legal, educational, political & institutional domains.
Source: The Hindu
