Ahmedabad "removed" from list of top cities for Air Quality Index monitoring, no data available since Nov 2015

Screenshot of website showing Ahmedabad AQI has "no data"

The Government of India does not seem to think that Ahmedabad is a major city, requiring monitoring of air quality index (AQI). A year ago, Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared 10 AQI monitoring stations open across the country, and Ahmedabad was one of them.
However, an Ahmedabad-based NGO has revealed that the station, set up in Ahmedabad, was closed down in November 2016, and isn’t operational ever since.A click on the site http://aqicn.org/city/india/ahmedabad/maninagar/ says, "Maninagar, Ahmedabad AQI: Real-time Air Quality Index (AQI).no data" as of June 5 at 1.25 pm (see screenshot above).
Worse, another site http://164.100.160.234:9000/ (Central Pollution Control Board), does not have Gujarat as one of the states whose National Air Quality Index would need to be monitored (see screenshot below).
The cities where the AQI stations were set up are New Delhi, Agra, Kanpur, Lucknow, Varanasi, Faridabad, Ahmedabad, Chennai, Bangalore and Hyderabad. The “broad plan” was to expand the AQI stations to 66 cities with a population of one million.

Pointing out that Ahmedabad is “missing” from the AQI stations list, too, on the website, Mahesh Pandya of Paryavaran Mitra, in a power point presentation, prepared for the World Environment Day (June 5), said, “It was last recorded on November 2015. From November 2015 till present (June 2016), there has been no monitoring data available on AQI system of Ahmedabad.”

Pandya suspects, this was done because the city was “possibly found to have very high air pollution levels”, and this undermine Modi’s effort to frantically sell Ahmedabad as a model city across the country. The station was to be used for informing people “about daily air quality and to provide advisories on health consequences.”
Suggesting that this is not the only example of indifference of the Gujarat government towards the impact of climate change, which has been “severe in the recent past”, Pandya said, “Gujarat has encountered warmer winters that have reduced moisture for winter crops, including maize, wheat, tur dal, etc., resulting in their sharply reduced yields. Farmers often have to leave their lands fallow."

Gujarat missing in list of states whose air quality needs to be monitored

Pointing out that Gujarat was the first, and still remains the only, state to form a separate climate change department, initiated in 2009, Pandya said, it became “the last state of India to come up with its own climate change action plan, which was to be based on the one adopted by the Union government in May 2015 for up to the year 2020.”
Worse, despite the big talk of transparency, Pandya said, the climate change department remained without a website of its own till about a month ago. The website went online following a right to information (RTI) plea filed by Paryavaran Mitra, following chief information commissioner Balwant Singh’s intervention in September 2015, asking officials to ensure that “all the information about climate change in Gujarat is available to the public.”
Things are no better for central effluent treatment plants (CETPs), which are supposed to treat industrial waste before disposing it off. “There are 37 CETPs in the state, of which 33 CETPs are operational and four were either proposed or at commissioning/ construction stage. Yet, none of the CETPs discharged their effluents as per the prescribed norms by the Gujarat Pollution Control Board, and wide variations were noticed in their performance,” said Pandya.
“A total of Rs 212.31 crore financial aid has been given by the state government for upgradation and establishment of CETPs. Although the capacity and financial support has increased since 2012, still the investment of substantial government finance in the CETP schemes does not justify in terms of pollution reduction and environment improvement”, he said.

Comments

Dalit rights and political tensions: Why is Mevani at odds with Congress leadership?

While I have known Jignesh Mevani, one of the dozen-odd Congress MLAs from Gujarat, ever since my Gandhinagar days—when he was a young activist aligned with well-known human rights lawyer Mukul Sinha’s organisation, Jan Sangharsh Manch—he became famous following the July 2016 Una Dalit atrocity, in which seven members of a family were brutally assaulted by self-proclaimed cow vigilantes while skinning a dead cow, a traditional occupation among Dalits.

Powering pollution, heating homes: Why are Delhi residents opposing incineration-based waste management

While going through the 50-odd-page report Burning Waste, Warming Cities? Waste-to-Energy (WTE) Incineration and Urban Heat in Delhi , authored by Chythenyen Devika Kulasekaran of the well-known advocacy group Centre for Financial Accountability, I came across a reference to Sukhdev Vihar — a place where I lived for almost a decade before moving to Moscow in 1986 as the foreign correspondent of the daily Patriot and weekly Link .

Boeing 787 under scrutiny again after Ahmedabad crash: Whistleblower warnings resurface

A heart-wrenching tragedy has taken place in Ahmedabad. As widely reported, a Boeing 787 Dreamliner plane crashed shortly after taking off from the city’s airport, currently operated by India’s top tycoon, Gautam Adani. The aircraft was carrying 230 passengers and 12 crew members. As expected, the crash has led to an outpouring of grief across the country. At the same time, there have been demands for the resignation of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah, and the Civil Aviation Minister.

Global NGO slams India for media clampdown during conflict, downplays Pakistan

A global civil rights group, Civicus has taken strong exception to how critical commentaries during the “recent conflict” with Pakistan were censored in India, with journalists getting “targeted”. I have no quarrel with the Civicus view, as the facts mentioned in it are all true.

Whither SCOPE? Twelve years on, Gujarat’s official English remains frozen in time

While writing my previous blog on how and why Narendra Modi went out of his way to promote English when he was Gujarat chief minister — despite opposition from people in the Sangh Parivar — I came across an interesting write-up by Aakar Patel, a well-known name among journalists and civil society circles.

Remembering Vijay Rupani: A quiet BJP leader who listened beyond party lines

Late evening on June 12, a senior sociologist of Indian origin, who lives in Vienna, asked me a pointed question: Of the 241 persons who died as a result of the devastating plane crash in Ahmedabad the other day, did I know anyone? I had no hesitation in telling her: former Gujarat chief minister Vijay Rupani, whom I described to her as "one of the more sensible persons in the BJP leadership."

Why India’s renewable energy sector struggles under 2,735 compliance hurdles

Recently, during a conversation with an industry representative, I was told how easy it is to set up a startup in Singapore compared to India. This gentleman, who had recently visited Singapore, explained that one of the key reasons Indians living in the Southeast Asian nation prefer establishing startups there is because the government is “extremely supportive” when it comes to obtaining clearances. “They don’t want to shift operations to India due to the large number of bureaucratic hurdles,” he remarked.

Guha plans book to counter Dalit, Marxist, and right-wing critics of Gandhi, recalls Modi’s 'pernicious lie' on Patel

Let me first confess: writing about an event three weeks after it has taken place is no good, especially for a newsperson. However, ever since I attended the public lecture by well-known historian Ramachandra Guha on May 18, organised by Sarthak Prakashan for the release of the Gujarati edition of his book monumental book "India After Gandhi", frankly, I kept wondering if he had said anything newsworthy apart from what had already appeared in the media ever since the book's first edition came out in 2007. Call it my inertia or whatever.

Two decades on, hunger still haunts Gujarat: Survey exposes stark gap behind poverty claims

A Niti Aayog report , released about two years ago, estimated that in Gujarat — which our powers-that-be have long considered a model state — 11.66% of people are "multidimensionally poor," a term referring to an index that seeks to estimate "multiple and simultaneous deprivations" at the household level across three macro categories: health, education, and living standards.

Search This Blog