Parl panel asks govt to come up with updated air quality norms at earliest

New Delhi: A Parliamentary panel on Friday asked the Centre to come up with the updated India’s National Ambient Air Quality Standards “at the earliest”, noting that the standards were last revised in 2009.

In a report tabled in the Lok Sabha on Friday, the Department-related Parliamentary Standing Committee on Science and Technology, Environment, Forests and Climate Change also recommended that all manual

stations in Delhi-NCR be upgraded to continuous ambient air quality monitoring systems.

It observed that the current distribution of air quality monitoring stations in Delhi is “heavily skewed” towards central and southern parts of the city, which are relatively less populated, greener and more affluent.

The committee said this geographical bias leads to “a distorted and nonrepresentative dataset”, systematically excluding more polluted, densely populated and less affluent areas.

The panel also noted that most of the six new continuous monitoring stations proposed for Delhi were again planned in relatively greener areas such as the JNU campus, while the trans-Yamuna region has “again been left out”.

It “strongly” recommended that the Environment Ministry reconsider the sites for these six stations and evenly redistribute monitoring stations across Delhi and the wider NCR.

Raising concern over the high GST on air purifiers and HEPA filters, the committee said it was contradictory that while attempts to control air pollution have fallen short, a prohibitive tax is levied on a device citizens use for personal protection.

“Imposing such a tax effectively monetises a public health failure. The committee feels that the citizens of the country should not be penalised for trying to save themselves from a catastrophic situation,” it said, recommending that the government either abolish or reduce the GST.

The panel said delivery riders, traffic police personnel, bike taxi riders and similar groups are “more vulnerable to the hazards of air pollution” and called for targeted programmes for their protection.

These could include directing e-commerce and logistics companies to provide high-quality protective masks such as N95 free of cost, mandatory company-funded annual health check-ups with additional check-ups after severe pollution episodes and the creation of a dedicated health risk profiling and monitoring system.