No pollution mitigation plan for Mumbai, WHO report must act as wake up call: Activists

The recent study released by World Health Organisation (WHO) that states around a lakh kids in India under five years died due to exposure to ambient and household PM2.5 pollution, has left Mumbaikars alarmed. Activists said it should be a wake up call for the city, which has such high PM 2.5 levels.

"This study is extremely worrying. Mumbai sees ever-mushrooming construction work that is a significant contributor to the PM 2.5 levels, along with rising number of vehicles," said environmentalist Stalin D. He added that it is sad that neither the BMC nor the state government take air pollution issues seriously.

He said that for the past decade, despite Mumbai seeing large scale infrastructure projects along with a boom in construction, no measure was implemented to ensure citizens are not impacted by the fine dust particles. None of the construction sites were abiding by dust management rules either.

"We don't even have an air pollution mitigation plan," Stalin said, adding that it needs to be a priority for the state environment department given the number of studies pointing at Mumbai's air getting dangerous.

Several city-based civic activists claimed that Mumbai's air is gradually turning toxic, but public health is still not a concern for the BMC or the state government, which are only busy cutting trees that help reduce particulate pollutants' impact.

Dr Gufran Beig, Project Director, System of Air Quality Weather Forecasting and Research (SAFAR), which generates Air Quality Index (AQI) profile for Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, and Ahmedabad, said that Air Quality Index (AQI) of Mumbai is surely a concern as it ranges between Moderate to Poor, while at certain monitoring stations it always falls in very poor category.

"However, the wind conditions and the fact that it is coastal city, saves Mumbaikars from prolonged exposure to the pollutants. However, this doesn't warrant ignorance from the authorities in identifying the main sources of PM 2.5 and make efforts to reduce them," he said.

Beig, however, refused to comment on the WHO study saying he doesn't know where the data was taken from. He also said that the Indian threshold for PM2.5 is 40 microgram per cubic metre, while WHO's standard is 10 microgram per cubic metre.

A 2016 study carried out by SAFAR indicted that the share of pollutants from residential and suspended dust contributed almost 48.25 per cent of the PM 2.5 levels in Mumbai. The SAFAR study showed sector-wise breakup. While the contribution of residential was 27.05 per cent, suspended dust contributed 21.2 per cent. A total of 35.82 per cent was from industrial emission and the power sector.