Air Quality Tracker: An invisible threat

August 05, 2024

Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) has alerted from time to time about the growing problem of ground-level ozone in Indian metropolitan areas. While policy and public attention is nearly fully drawn towards very high level of particulate pollution, the challenge of this highly toxic gas has not attracted adequate policy attention for mitigation and prevention. Inadequate monitoring, limited data and inappropriate methods of trend analysis have weakened the understanding of this growing public health hazard. This requires early action.

The summer of 2024 has witnessed widespread ground-level ozone exceedance making the air more toxic across 10 major metropolitan areas of India. This time the geographical spread of the problem is much wider than the lockdown summer of 2020 in most metropolitan areas. The phase of the toxic built up has lasted longer in locations affected by the problem. Even the smaller metropolitan areas have witnessed rapid increase. In metropolitan areas in the south and western coastal belt the problem is not limited only to summer months.