Three years on, shoddy implementation of NCAP by states likely to derail 2024 clean air goals

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The National Clean Air Programme (NCAP) was launched by the Ministry of Environment and Forest (MoEF&CC) three years ago on January 10, 2019, with the goal of reducing air pollution levels by 20-30 percent in the next five years.

However, in the three years that have passed, little to no progress has been made by states to implement the programme and reduce PM 2.5 levels in 132 cities across the country, researchers at the Centre for Research and on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) have found.

In a report titled ‘Tracing the Hazy Air: Progress Report on National Clean Air Programme (NCAP)’, CREA highlighted that barring city-specific action plans, no other plan has been formulated under NCAP prescribed timelines. The state action plans, regional action plans, and the transboundary action plan are yet to see the light of the day.

Explaining why CREA tracked the progress made by the states instead of analysing the air quality, Sunil Dahiya, author of the report and an analyst at CREA, said: “The past two years have been unusual due to the COVID-19 pandemic resulting in a halt for industrial and economic activities due to national and regional lockdowns, so a better indicator to track the effectiveness and implementation of NCAP was to track the progress on indicators identified under the programme.”

Elaborating on the progress made so far, Dahiya said: “NCAP and Clean Air action Plans for Cities were dynamic documents which were expected to be updated and made more efficient in controlling the rising air pollution levels with completion of research studies. But, sadly, all timelines for the formulation of state and regional level action plans as well as emission inventory and source apportionment studies have passed, and none of them have been formulated till now.”

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The study analysed information gathered through RTI applications, parliamentary proceedings, and other publicly available data, to find that at the end of three years, out of the targeted 1,500 manual monitoring stations that were supposed to be installed across the country, only 818 are present today.

The progress has been even more sluggish with regard to equipping the manual stations with PM2.5 monitoring, with only 261 stations having the facilities at the moment.

Further, none of the 132 non-attainment cities have completed their carrying capacity studies – an assessment of the region’s ability to accumulate and disperse emissions while maintaining breathable air quality.

Financing under the NCAP was also found to have discrepancies and a lack of transparency vis-à-vis allocation and utilisation of funds to help reduce the emission of air pollutants.

On November 1, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had announced at the 26th Conference of Parties (COP26) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), that India will achieve the target of net-zero emissions by 2070. This goal would have been easier to achieve if NCAP had targeted absolute emission across the country.

Dahiya explained: “In order to achieve our CoP26 commitments we need to put a break on fossil fuel consumption both for electricity generation as well as petroleum product consumption in the transportation sector, which in turn is the main cause for air pollution, so acting on polluting fuels will be aiming two birds/evils with one arrow.”

He added: “Reducing fossil fuels will not only result in combating rising air pollution levels and climate change but will also save billions in expenditure on health bills, welfare loss cost, and climate catastrophe costs. For this very important reason, NCAP should have targeted absolute emission and pollution reduction target across the country.”