NE's first clean air workshop to kick off in Guwahati from Tuesday

GUWAHATI: The city will from Tuesday host a two-day workshop for coming up with an action plan to improve air quality.
"Guwahati is among the few cities selected across India and the first in the northeast to take up the air action plan initiative. It will allow a wider discussion on arriving at an effective way to tackle air pollution.

The workshop will be a capacity-building exercise to help policy-makers come up with measures to make the air cleaner," said Prarthana Borah, director of the India operations of Clean Air Asia, which is partnering the Guwahati Municipal Corporation in conducting the workshop. The city's mayor Mrigen Sarania, GMC commissioner Monalisa Goswami and councillors from the municipal administration, and experts on air quality, academics and health practitioners will attend the workshop.

The major challenge to tackling air pollution in the city as of now is reliable data. The state pollution control board is yet to install five of the six National Air Quality Monitoring Programme stations in the city, which means the levels of PM 2.5 are not being monitored. "We have only one machine to measure PM 2.5. Another machine may be installed in Khanapara soon," an official from the Pollution Control Board of Assam said.

The permissible limit for PM 2.5 as prescribed by the World Health Organization is 10 micrograms per cubic metre annual mean and 25 micrograms per cubic metre 24-hour mean. Data collected in a one-year study of urban black carbon emission in Lachit Nagar during winter by the department of science and technology under the Centre and IIT-Guwahati, published last year, had put the PM 2.5 levels in the city at 111.295 micrograms per cubic metre.