More cities to emulate Delhi’s Odd-Even formula

After Delhi’s show of Odd-Even, several other cities may also witness similar schemes to curb the pollution menace in coming future. Central government is planning to implement Graded Response Plan to curb alarmingly rising pollution. The detailed plan is likely to be notified in January 2017 with a time bound strategy to implement it before November.

“We are working on a plan to include all the highly polluting cities in the Graded Response Plan which was approved to curb air pollution in Delhi,” said Anil Madhav Dave, Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Environment, Forest and Climate Change on Friday.  

The plan was approved by the Supreme Court on December 3 to curb air pollution in Delhi has three categories – severe or emergency, very poor and moderate or poor. According to senior officials of the department, the priority will be given to implementation of ‘emergency’ measures in next year in the cities where pollution has reached on alarming level.

In a report in 2016, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has put 11 Indian cities in the top 20 polluted cities of the world. Surprisingly, Gwalior was the second most polluted city of world followed by Allahabad while Delhi was on 11th position.

 The major polluting cities in the country are Patna, Raipur, Ludhiana, Kanpur, Khanna, Agra, Firozabad, Lucknow, Varanasi, Faridabad, Ghaziabad and Gurugram.