Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the Ganga ghat in Varanasi, December 13, 2021. Photo: PTI
- In Varanasi, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Lok Sabha constituency, the atmospheric levels of two pollutants have been far greater than the allowed limits for the third year in a row.
- A major source of these pollutants – PM2.5 and NO2 – as well as PM10 is vehicle use, and it may be no coincidence that Uttar Pradesh alone has more than 20% of India’s old vehicles.
- Varanasi’s AQI improved marginally in November 2021, but experts attributed it not to the city’s or state’s efforts but to scattered rain and less stubble burning at the time.
Kochi: In Varanasi, which is Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Lok Sabha constituency, the atmospheric levels of two pollutants – fine particulate matter and nitrogen dioxide – have been far greater than the permissible levels specified by the Central Pollution Control Board for the third year in a row.
This finding has emerged in an analysis by NCAP Tracker, a platform that monitors air pollution and policy. NCAP stands for ‘National Clean Air Programme’, an initiative that the Union environment ministry launched in January 2019, with Varanasi as one of 122 cities in its coverage. Through the NCAP, the ministry intends to reduce particulate matter concentration by at least 20% by 2024.
Environment minister Bhupender Yadav tweeted that he chaired the first meeting of the NCAP’s apex committee today, and added: “India has been at the forefront of taking up policy approaches that give paramount importance to conserving ecology.” The ecology and the ambient environment are different things, and irrespective of what the NCAP is doing about ecological issues, the new findings must give its authorities pause.
The NCAP Tracker is a separate entity – a joint project by CarbonCopy, a news portal, and Respirer Living Sciences, a company that develops real-time air quality monitoring systems.
Fine particulate matter, a.k.a. PM2.5, are small, inhalable particles with diameters of 2.5 micrometres (µm) or smaller. Nitrogen dioxide (NO2) is a gas that is part of vehicular and industrial emissions with potentially dire environmental and health effects.
Varanasi recorded PM2.5 levels of 96, 67 and 61 µg/m3 of air in 2019, 2020 and 2021, respectively. And in the same years, the tracker found NO2 levels to be 55, 31 and 53 µg/m3.
The Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) is the apex statutory body in India for pollution control and is governed by the Union environment ministry. It prescribes an annual average of 40 µg/m3 as the permissible upper limit for both PM2.5 and NO2 concentrations in the lower atmosphere.
Pollution trackers in Varanasi registered the sole NO2 measurement that was below the permissible limit in 2020 – of 31 ug/m3 – and experts said this was likely because of the slowdown of industrial and vehicular activity during the COVID-19 lockdown. The NCAP Tracker also said in its press release that this is why 2020 is considered to be an “anomaly year”.
The people behind the tracker used data from a single continuous ambient air-quality monitoring system – Varanasi’s longest-running – in the Ardali Bazar area. They ignored data from the three other stations also supplying real-time data because they were installed only in 2021.
They found that Ardali Bazar, a “heavily crowded” area with lots of traffic, has an annual NO2 average that’s almost 1.5-times the CPCB limit as well as far beyond the WHO’s newly updated limit: 10 µg/m3 on average over a year.
In 2018, air-pollution experts Arideep Mukherjee and Madhoolika Agrawal of the Banaras Hindu University (BHU) reported that vehicular traffic is probably Varanasi’s major local source of PM2.5, followed by paved road dust and other combustion activities.
“Fine PM levels in Varanasi city exceeded the daily mean 24-hr national CPCB and WHO standards for ~75% and 93% of monitoring days, indicating the alarming status of PM pollution in this area,” they wrote.
“Dense monitoring using sensors under smart city projects can help track and mitigate pollution sources,” said S.N. Tripathi, a professor in the civil engineering department of IIT Kanpur and a steering committee member of the National Clean Air Programme, in the tracker analysis press release. “E-buses can also help in reducing vehicular pollution in a substantial way.”
“Having year-long, above-average concentrations of nitrogen dioxide, which is evidently in busy traffic or high density industrial areas, shows where the action should be,” said CarbonCopy publisher Aarti Khosla.
Increase in Varanasi
Varanasi, considered a holy city by Hindus, has reported an increasing atmospheric concentration of fine particulate matter for some time. In 2017, scientists from the BHU and IIT Delhi used satellite data to find that PM2.5 levels in Varanasi increased 1.5-3% every year from 2001 to 2015, a pace they called “rapid”.
Their data also indicated that the PM2.5 persisted for a long time: the city had more of these particles in the air than the national air quality standard allowed for 87% of the days in a year.
This, the researchers wrote, translated to a burden of 5,700 annual premature deaths.
In 2018, Mukherjee and Agrawal, at BHU, reported that that the mean PM10 [footnote]Particulate matter of width 10 micrometres or more[/footnote] concentration between 2014 and 2017 was around 244 μg/m3 – four-times higher than the CPCB’s limit – with vehicular pollution as the major source.
It may be no coincidence that Uttar Pradesh alone has more than 20% of India’s old vehicles – more than 20 lakh vehicles – according to Hindustan Times. But Varanasi itself has a poor reputation vis-à-vis pollution: it is reportedly one of India’s 43 “critically polluted zones” across the country, and had zero ‘good’ air days in 2015.
Monthly trends
All this said, there have been some signs of improvement in the monthly trends of the National Air Quality Index, including Varanasi, since November this year. The National Air Quality Index goes from 0 to 500 and is based on the sub-indices of three to eight pollutants measured in 24-hour intervals and their respective health impacts. In Varanasi, the index reportedly improved from “severe” to “moderate”. (An air quality index, or AQI, of 401-500 is ‘severe’ and of 101-200 is ‘moderate’.)
At 4 pm on December 17, the AQI for Varanasi was 104-185, per real time data provided by the CPCB.
Ajay Sharma, the member-secretary of the Uttar Pradesh Pollution Control Board (UPPCB) told Hindustan Times last week that the AQI of major cities in the state had “not only improved since last month but are also better than the numbers of previous years”. Sharma attributed this improvement to the UPPCB’s work – but experts said the causes were likelier to be scattered rains in parts of western Uttar Pradesh and less stubble burning at this time of year.
Uttar Pradesh is part of national schemes to tackle air pollution and has similar schemes of its own. At the same time, the state government has approved several infrastructure projects, including many to make Varanasi a ‘Smart City’ under the national project of the same name. Large-scale construction work is a known emitter of atmospheric pollutants.
In 2017, the Union environment ministry announced the ‘Graded Response Action Plan’ to address the terrible air pollution in Delhi and its surrounding National Capital Region (NCR), including Uttar Pradesh, under the Environment Protection Act 1986. The plan lists some strict measures for states to apply when the air quality becomes dangerous – such as banning the use of diesel generators and whom to hold accountable.
Indian Express wrote in October that the plan has successfully got several agencies on board to collaborate on controlling air pollution. However, at the time the Supreme Court approved the CPCB’s plan, in 2016, public policy experts Dharmesh Shah and Shweta Narayan wrote in The Wire:
As a policy, [the plan] can at most promise to mitigate exposure. It shies away from addressing the root causes behind deteriorating air quality. For starters, even with [the plan] in place, Delhi cannot breathe safe if Punjab and Haryana continue to pollute. In that sense, the scheme overlooks a fundamental issue with regard to air pollution – that it transcends physical borders.