Is Ahmedabad Ready To Fight Pollution?

After the festival of Diwali, a Delhi-NCR-like situation has arisen in Ahmedabad, too. The financial capital of Gujarat is struggling with poor air quality – the Air Quality Index (AQI) has been recorded at 456 after Diwali up from 201 on November 6 – owing to falling temperature and rising pollution caused by firecrackers. According to a Lancet study, this drop in air quality could put 32 per cent of the state’s population at risk of suffering from respiratory disease and asthma due to pollution. Although the Centre is in the process of drafting the National Clean Air Programme, the Air Action Plan for Ahmedabad is struggling with delays since the past three years.

It was in 2016 when Ahmedabad was ranked as one of the most polluted cities in India for the first time. To counter that, India’s first monitoring and early warning system for air pollution was launched in the city with the hope that it will reduce the health impacts and deaths from air pollution. Around eight new air quality monitoring sites across Ahmedabad were identified to produce a daily AQI with 11 LED screens for public display, under Air Information and Response (AIR) plan.

The AIR plan was drafted by the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation but has not been fully implemented yet. The plan proposes to improve vehicle technology by not registering new four wheelers that are not Bharat Stage-III-compliant. Other than this, the city’s transport department has phased out 342 buses which were more than 15 years old. Another 72 buses have to be phased out in the second phase. While tenders have been floated for 100 CNG buses.

Major causes of pollution 

While pollution caused by firecrackers and climatic condition is a seasonal contributor, according to the Gujarat ENVIS Centre, major contributors to air pollution are industries and vehicles. According to a report, rate of urbanisation and industrialisation leading to a growth of vehicles make cities like Ahmedabad, Surat, Vadodara and Rajkot the hot spots for air pollution. Ahmedabad also had more than 2,000 industrial air-polluting units as of May 2012, the report stated while the number of the vehicle doubled in past ten years.