Vizag Air Quality Index at 350, Beats Delhi

Visakhapatnam:While Visakhapatnam is heading for rapid industrialisation with many data centres and IT companies lining up to launch their operations, inversely, the city’s air quality is turning worse.

On Friday, the air quality index at Visakhapatnam central area around noon showed 350, while Delhi, said to be the most polluted city, displayed the index at 316 around the same time.

Stating that the issue was being unduly blown up, the state pollution control officials said there existed only one continuous ambient air quality monitoring station for GVMC, covering a radius of one kilometre.

“The index does not represent the entire Visakhapatnam city’s pollution levels. It can be far less,’’ said joint chief engineer of PCB, Mukunda Rao.

He told Deccan Chronicle on Friday that the air quality here during winter “becomes poor due to condensation of fine particulate matter and low dispersion in the lower portions of the atmosphere.”

“The city is geographically located in a bowl shaped area which leads to low dispersion of pollutants. It is also located in close proximity to Visakhapatnam Port trust and the other industries in the bowl area,” he added.

Mukunda Rao said the APPCB has also been monitoring ambient air quality by installing manual stations at nine locations covering the Visakhapatnam city under national ambient air monitoring programme. “Whereas the manual stations cover all the zones-residential, commercial and industrial, the dust concentrations at manual stations are much lower compared with CAAQMS station.”

For AQI calculations, the central pollution control board is considering only CAAQM stations data. As Vizag is having only one station at GVMC, which is being considered for AQI, this cannot be representative of the whole city. This may be the reason for the high AQI values being disseminated, he said.

Generally, the air quality index is in the range of 80-200 from March to October. For most days a year, the AQI is satisfactory to moderate (50- 200). But this has considerably increased here from November due to change in weather conditions, the PCB official explained.

This, he said, is not an accident of weather but the result of structural failure. It is a saga of misplaced priorities, years of neglect, of prioritising industrial profits over human lives,” said VS Krishna of the human rights forum.

“The worst off are the areas around industrial emissions and high traffic zones. Each winter, thermal inversions and scant rainfall trap pollutants close to the ground, pushing AQI levels to perilous peaks,” Krishna added.