India lacks enough monitoring stations to quantify air pollution crisis: Experts

By Aakanksha Khajuria New Delhi, Oct 27 : With Delhi facing another tryst with the air pollution, several environmental experts believe that the problem goes beyond the national capital and that the country needs to ramp up the number of air quality pollution monitoring stations to quantify the problem and prioritize the areas which require immediate attention.
As per the data of the Central Pollution Control Board, there are 793 operating stations in 344 cities and towns.
Currently, the country has only 230 continuous monitors. Most of these stations, residential or industrial, are located in urban areas, and the coverage in the rural areas is sparse. This is relevant since residential combustion emissions, associated with solid fuel use, are a key source of air pollution.
Sarath Guttikunda, Director of Urban Emissions (India), an independent research group on air pollution, told IANS that the air pollution monitoring stations are still limited in India and out of the 230 continuous monitors, 75 are in and around Delhi and most of the cities have 1-2 stations, which is not a representative sample.
“We have an understanding from the models and some monitoring that air pollution is a problem in both urban and rural areas. True sense of the scale of the air pollution problem will be visible only if we monitor air quality properly at the extent that the data represents the problem spatially and temporally,” he added.
There is a substantial gap in the availability of data on air pollution due to the lack of real-time air quality monitoring stations in many cities. Many locations have manual air quality monitoring stations which take days to show the result and are also subject to human errors.