BMC budget proposes 3-pronged attack on air pollution

MUMBAI: The BMC has allocated ₹113.18 crore in its budget for the environment department, focusing on a three-pronged approach to tackle air pollution.

First, a five-year contract with the Automotive Research Association of India to conduct periodic emission inventories in the city will verify which source is emitting what quantity of pollutants. Secondly, the BMC is in the process of sealing a deal with IIT Kanpur for the installation of 75 low-cost air-quality-measuring sensors, costing between ₹300,000 and 10,00,000 each, across the city.

“The low-cost air quality stations are not always accurate, so they will have to be read with the Continuous Ambient Air Quality Monitoring Systems (CAAQMS) and calibrated to ensure that they’re giving right readings, plus have a person over to inspect and clean the data,” said an environment department official.

The above two in combination will help the BMC accomplish the third method, a 72-hour air-quality forecasting system, called AIRWISE. “Taking inputs from the emissions inventory, the CAAQMS stations, the low-cost sensors, satellite imagery and meteorology, the AIRWISE system will be calibrated to Mumbai’s conditions to forecast air quality for three days,” said the official. “We will collaborate with the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune, for this, at a cost of ₹2.7 crore for the year 2025-26.”

Other measures to tackle air pollution have already been announced, such as five new CAAQMS stations, four mobile air-quality measuring vans, 95 ward-level squads to ensure implementation of the Environment Management Plan at construction sites, road washing and mechanised cleaning, 100 dust-suction machines, converting wood/fossil fuel bakeries to cleaner fuel, and the Mumbai Air App.

Sree Kumar Kumaraswamy from the Clean Air Action program by WRI India said that the proposed emission inventory study was a crucial step in the right direction. “A science-based mapping is essential to understand how pollutants travel due to meteorological factors, ultimately affecting local air quality across the region,” he said.

Environmentalist Debi Goenka, however, said a preventive approach was needed. “The solution to control air pollution is not to try and vacuum dust, for example, but to prevent the dust emissions at source,” he said.