In spite of significant progress made in improving air quality, 92% of the world's population still lives in places where air quality much exceeds the WHO guidelines. According to WHO Report 2018, an estimated 7 million deaths were associated with pollution. This cause of mortality accounts for 11.6 per cent of all global deaths.
India with its 14 out of 15 world's most polluted cities has a gigantic task of monitoring and mitigating air pollution from its mega cities, state capital and satellite towns. Air Quality of Delhi and NCR region has been a matter of grave concern for the last few years. Alarms were raised when AQI touched 999 in the month of October 2016. The problem was further compounded with the crop residue (Pallari) being burnt by farmers of the NCR region that surrounds the capital city of Delhi. It should be noted that New York/New Jersey, London and Munich were as polluted or even worse than Delhi 1950s, 1960s and up to 1970s, but the timely interventions of the policy makers, planners and the government that recognize the problem with a sense of urgency and thus rolled out strategic policies and actions that resulted in mitigating air pollution in these mega world cities.
Drastic steps like Odd-Even Vehicles on alternative days have been introduced in Delhi to demonstrate their impact on the Air Quality. The coal-based power plants have also been targeted as they contributed heavily to particulate matter in air. The National Green Tribunal (NGT) has also came down heavily on construction agencies as construction activities in and around Delhi were also identified as a major source of particulate matter in Air. All these measures are still falling short for drastically reducing the particulate matter in Delhi and in the NCR region, as AQI still remains above 200 during most part of the year while the Global standards require AQI to be below 20. We need to wage a war on Air Pollution if we have to achieve blue sky for our people and drastically bring down the Particulate Matter in air to the levels of Air Quality standards mandated by WHO.
At Amity University Gurugram, recognizing the emergent need for strategic interventions based on scientific research on Air Pollution and its impact on human and environmental health, in 2016 a Centre for Air Quality and Human Heath was established following the visit of Dr Srikanth Nanadur, Program Director at NIH USA to Amity University Haryana. This Centre has been further supported by a multi-disciplinary and multi-institutional Climate Research Laboratory (CRL) facility at AUH and an Amity Air Quality Monitoring Station (AAQMS), a MAPAN (Modeling of Air Pollution And Networking (MAPAN) system, an overshoot of SAFAR (System of Air-Quality Forecasting And Research), established in collaboration with the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM-MoES), Pune. These facilities are engaged in real time monitoring of air pollutants. AUH conducted its Air Quality Studies during the Odd-Even Phase-I in January 2016 and again Odd-Even Phase-II in April 2016 and found significant improvement in AQI in capital city of Delhi (Devara et al., 2016; Sharma et al., 2016). Air Quality studies have also been carried out by AUH during dust storms and festive periods (Devara et al., 2017), and significant results related to Particulate Matter (primary aerosols) and Gas Constituents (secondary aerosols) over Panchgaon (a rural station, ~50 km away from Delhi) have been published (Devara et al., 2016; Devara, 2018; Abhijit et al., 2018; Dumka et al., 2019).
With India sitting on an Air Pollution disaster, the present Government has accorded its top priority to tackle this monstrous problem, and commissioned the National Clean Air Program, NCAP 2019, in January 2019, that goals at cutting down air pollution by 30% from the levels of 2017 in next five years, i.e. by 2024.
It is with a sense of utmost urgency that Amity University Haryana convened an International Symposium on Air pollution – Causes, Mitigation and Strategic Planning on 20th September 2019 to bring together renowned experts from US, Norway and India, policy makers and practitioners to brainstorm and come out with valuable recommendations and concrete action plan to mitigate air pollution and suggest valuable and implementable strategic options to the authorities that would result in a quantum reduction in AQI in the most polluted cities of India, including Delhi and its NCR satellite towns of Gurgaon, Faridabad and Ghaziabad.