“This winter has been the cleanest in New Delhi-NCR since large-scale air quality monitoring started in 2018,” said Anumita Roychowdhury, executive director-research and advocacy, Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), while releasing here today CSE’s latest analysis of winter air pollution levels.
A comprehensive analysis of PM2.5 trends during the entire winter season (October 2022-January 2023) in Delhi-NCR shows a “bending of the winter pollution curve and lowering of peak levels”, reports CSE. The analysis was conducted by the Urban Lab at CSE, and has revealed a continuous drop in seasonal average levels of air pollution, although elevated levels prevailed at city stations.
“This improvement is a combined effect of meteorology and emergency action based on pollution forecasting. There was heavy and extended rainfall in the early phases of the season that prevented smog episodes from building up and also lowered the seasonal average. Despite the decline, Delhi continues to remain the most polluted among the cities and towns of NCR. This downward trend will have to be sustained with much stronger action on vehicles, industry, waste burning, construction, solid fuel and biomass burning to meet the clean air standard,” says Roychowdhury.
“The analysis shows that there were still 10 days of severe and severe-plus air quality and one four-day long smog episode during this winter. In the larger NCR, seasonal averages varied considerably among the cities and towns, but high pollution episodes were synchronised despite large distances. Delhi and the neighboring cities of Faridabad, Ghaziabad, Gurugram and Noida were relatively more polluted than other NCR towns, though not significantly. This is the challenge of this landlocked region that demands even stronger action,” says Avikal Somvanshi, senior programme manager, Urban Lab, CSE.
The city-wide winter average for Delhi stood at 160 microgramme per cubic metre (µg/m³) for the October-January period, which is the lowest level recorded since wide-scale monitoring started in 2018-19.
The PM2.5 level, computed by averaging monitoring data from 36 CAAQMS stations located in the city, was 17 per cent lower compared to the seasonal average of 2018-19 winter. Based on the subset of the 10 oldest stations, there is an improvement of almost 20 per cent.
