City transport minister Gopal Rai said on Friday that the AAP government will continue its campaigns such as the odd-even car rationing scheme and once-a-month car-free day as he described the WHO urb
City transport minister Gopal Rai said on Friday that the AAP government will continue its campaigns such as the odd-even car rationing scheme and once-a-month car-free day as he described the WHO urban air quality database released a day earlier as an achievement for residents of Delhi.
Mr Rai added that the AAP government will initiate a 10-point agenda to combat pollution in the national capital after analysing the latest WHO report in detail.
“After a detailed study of the report and to take measures that make more impact, the AAP government will experiment with many more measures. The government has also started working towards a 10-point agenda to combat air pollution in Delhi,” he said before leaving for treatment at Apollo Hospital in Hyderabad.
The minister said the Kejriwal government, in a bid to curb the PM10 (coarse pollution particles) levels in the city, will experiment with the measures adopted world over.
He added that the transport department will initiate “vociferous” awareness campaigns on pollution, once he returns to Delhi after three weeks.
Environmentalists in the city, however, sounded caution over the latest WHO report, which showed that Delhi was not the most polluted city as per 2012-13 data, saying it does not give the right and complete picture.
Greenpeace India campaigner Sunil Dahiya said the 2014 WHO report, under which Delhi earned the tag of being the most polluted city, was based on the data of 2013 from six monitoring stations, while the new report records data from 10 stations.
“If anybody is saying that there is improvement in Delhi’s air quality, then it will be wrong as you are taking the data for the same year, but at more places,” Mr Dahiya said.
Referring to Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal’s statement “congratulating” people over the findings of the report, Sunita Narain of the Centre for Science and Environment said people rush to take credit “where it’s not due.”
“This data is comparing 2012 to 2014. This is not of the current chief minister’s period,” she said, noting that the data was two years old.
