Delhi plans mesh of sensors to monitor bad air hot spots

NEW DELHI: The national capital's 40 real-time ambient air quality monitoring stations (CAAQMS) account for a network that roughly covers every 37 sq km of Delhi's 1,484 sq km area, if these stations were spread out at equal distance from each other across the city.

- Jasjeev Gandhiok

While this network is considerably denser than the four stations functional each in Gurugram, Ghaziabad, Noida and Faridabad, and the two stations in Greater Noida, the Delhi Pollution Control Committee (DPCC) is now considering deploying multiple low-cost sensors to enhance the coverage further.

The idea is to install these sensors at the neighbourhood level to create a spatial grid alerting the anti-pollution body of changes in air quality levels in different parts of the same area, to enable local interventions in places where spikes are reported, DPCC officials aware of the matter said. If approved, the plan is start by using these sensors in Delhi's 13 pollution hot spots, where urgent corrective action in needed, they added.

These sensors function in a similar way to an automatic realtime stations present in Delhi, but they will also be able to identify local sources of pollution, which otherwise cannot be detected by a real-time station as it covers a substantially larger area. Depending on which sensor is showing high-levels of pollution, we can take corrective action, for example acting on dust in its vicinity or any kind of garbage burning, said a senior DPCC official who asked not to be named.