Delhi remained most polluted city in 2022: NCAP tracker

The NCAP tracker is a joint project of the Carbon Copy portal and Maharashtra-based Respirer Living Sciences.

The Union Government launched NCAP in 2019 to address air pollution in 102 cities, to which more cities were added later. There are now 131 non-attainment cities, that are cities which did not meet national ambient air quality standards (NAAQS) for the period of 2011-15 under the National Air Quality Monitoring Program (NAMP).

The country’s current annual average safe limits for PM 2.5 and PM 10 are 40 ug/m3 and 60 ug/m3. The NCAP initially set a target of reducing key air pollutants PM10 and PM2.5 by 20-30% in 2024, taking the pollution levels in 2017 as the base year to improve upon. In September 2022, the centre set a new target of a 40% reduction in particulate matter concentration in cities covered under NCAP by 2026.

Government data shows that in the past four years, Rs 6,897.06 crore has been released to the cities.

For analysis, the NCAP tracker has only taken into account non-attainment cities which recorded a monitoring uptime of more than 50%.

The analysis has found that most cities in the top 10 most polluted list of 2022 are from the Indo-Gangetic Plain. All three of Bihar’s non-attainment cities — Patna, Muzaffarpur and Gaya, now feature in the top 10 on the basis of PM 2.5 levels.

The top ten most polluted cities in 2022 for PM 2.5 were Delhi, Faridabad, Ghaziabad, Patna, Muzzafarpur, Noida, Meerut, Gobindgarh, Gaya and Jodhpur.

The top ten most polluted cities in 2022 based on PM 10 were Ghaziabad, Faridabad, Delhi, Noida, Patna, Meerut, Muzzafarpur, Durgapur, Jodhpur and Aurangabad.

The position of the cleanest city in India in 2022 was jointly held by Srinagar in Kashmir and Kohima in Nagaland. While Srinagar had a PM 2.5 concentration of 26.33 ug/m3, Kohima had a PM 10 concentration of 26.77 ug/m3. Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh, which made concerted efforts towards air quality management, has been ranked in both lists as one of the top ten cleanest cities.

“While among the least polluted non-attainment cities this year, nine of the 10 cities have breached the CPCB annual permissible limit of 60 ug/m3 for PM 10, indicating the air to breathe isn’t safe even in the cleanest cities,” said the report.

“Unlike the most polluted cities, most of the least polluted cities in 2019 saw air quality levels deteriorate and rankings slip. For instance, Mumbai was the seventh least polluted city in 2019 but its

PM 2.5 levels increased from 34 ug/m3 in 2019 to 49 ug/m3 in 2022 and dropped to being the 23rd least polluted city in the country,’’ the NCAP tracker report added.

The analysis points out, however, that one of the reasons for the increase in Mumbai could be attributed to increased levels of monitoring, from nine CAAQMS in 2019 to 20 in 2022.

In January 2019, there were 152 CAAQMS in the country, which has increased to 418 CAAQMS.

For both PM 2.5 and PM 10 concentrations, the majority of cities in the top 10 most polluted list are from Uttar Pradesh.