Punjab residents ask politicians to set air quality agendas
Darpan News Desk The Canadian Press, 28 Oct, 2021 10:19 AM
Chandigarh, Oct 28 (IANS) In the lead up to the Assembly polls in Punjab, experts and civil society members on Thursday discussed and developed a detailed set of recommendations to improve air quality across the state here.
The recommendations will now be included in the people's manifesto to tackle air pollution and will be soon submitted to all political parties.
Organised by EcoSikh and Clean Air Punjab, a citizen's collective working on the issue of air pollution, over 50 prominent citizens across the state attended the meeting.
Citizens' demands focused on their right to clean air and the ability to breathe, highlighting the fact that Punjab is home to some of India's most polluted cities, including Mandi Gobindgarh, Amritsar, Jalandhar, Ludhiana, Khanna, and Patiala.
Speaking about how citizen groups have elevated the dialogue on air pollution and made it an election issue for the upcoming legislative elections, Supreet Kaur, President of EcoSikh, said, "The year is the first time that air pollution has been highlighted in citizen campaigns across Punjab. The momentum built by citizen groups, health practitioners and experts has taken years to reach its current scale,"
She said residents of the state are up in arms seeing the toxic air not only impacting them but also their children.
Kaur said the people will vote for their right to clean air this election and no matter who gets elected, they will hold their leaders responsible to lead and bring about the necessary changes to safeguard the health of people from air pollution.
One of the key recommendations that was unanimously agreed was increasing the air quality monitoring network in the state.
Punjab has a total of nine non-attainment or million-plus cities under the National Clean Air Action Plan (NCAP) and everyone in the deliberation agreed that each non-attainment city should have a minimum of five real-time air quality monitoring stations covering the diverse type of land uses, which included residential, traffic, industrial, mixed-use or commercial areas.
Further, villages close to the non-attainment cities should have at least two real-time monitoring stations each.
Air pollution is one of the biggest environmental challenges India is facing today.
Punjab annually generates 20 million tonnes of paddy straw and this is normally set on fire to quickly clear the fields for the next crop, resulting in choking of the National Capital Region (NCR) in October and November.
Priyanka's remarks came after farmers on Tuesday evening vacated the railway tracks and highways in Punjab after the Amarinder Singh government accepted the demands of the sugarcane farmers.
The 'rebel' legislators reached Dehradun in the morning to apprise Rawat about the mood of the public against the Amarinder Singh-led government in the state. They, among 20-odd party legislators, have been demanding replacement of Amarinder Singh as he failed to fulfill the 2017 poll promises.
Rao also slammed Chief Minister Pramod Sawant for raking up 10-year-old allegations related to the mining scam in an attempt to put Congress leaders in the dock in pollbound Goa.
According to the customs department, one male passenger aged 27 years, flew in from Dubai by Emirates flight EK-544 was intercepted at exit gate and his baggage which were found to be unusually heavy were subjected for detailed examination.
According to the sources, the panel members were reported about the delay and red tapism in the bureaucracy which has been hampering the pace of development in Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh and many new schemes announced by the Union government were getting affected.
