BMC to Add Five New Air Quality Monitoring Stations Across Mumbai Gardens

Mumbai: The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) is set to install five additional air quality monitoring stations across Mumbai at Rs 22 crore amid concerns over deteriorating air quality in the city, officials said on Friday. The proposed Continuous Ambient Air Quality Monitoring Stations (CAAQMS) will be set up in Mulund, Dadar, Goregaon, Charni Road and Santacruz, they said.

Currently, Dadar, Charni Road and Mulund have no monitoring stations.

Mumbai now has 29 CAAQMS facilities monitored by the BMC, Maharashtra Pollution Control Board and the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology. Their readings are fed into 'Sameer', the Central Pollution Control Board's (CPCB) national air quality monitoring dashboard.

A senior civic official said that of the five new proposed monitoring stations, two will replace existing BMC facilities, while the remaining three will be at those locations where no facility exists within a five-kilometre radius.

Mumbai's overall Air Quality Index (AQI) over the past week has fluctuated between moderate and poor to very poor.

The Rs 22-crore project includes installation, operation and maintenance of the five facilities for five years. The stations are expected to become operational within six months, he said.

About the choice of locations, the civic official said the sites comply with CPCB guidelines and are intended to function as urban background monitoring stations to assess the general ambient air quality of neighbourhoods.

"We have selected the best possible locations for installing the new proposed stations, taking the CPCB guidelines into consideration," the civic official said, adding that they require 300-700 square feet of land for each of these automatic monitoring stations.