The irony is difficult to overlook. Indore, which has worn the crown of India’s ‘cleanest metropolis’ in authorities’s Swachh rankings for seven straight years, has been struggling to scrub up its air. The largest metropolis in Madhya Pradesh has seen a 21% rise in ranges of the pollutant PM10 between 2017-18 and 2023-24, in line with lately launched authorities knowledge.
Indore figured amongst 31 ‘non-attainment’ cities – the place air high quality had deteriorated because the 2017-18 base yr – in a listing of 130 which are monitored underneath the National Clean Air Program (NCAP), which goals to scale back PM10 ranges in these. city facilities by as much as 40% by 2025-26.
While the checklist of ‘non-attainment’ cities contains locations reminiscent of Navi Mumbai and Vizag, which additionally ranked excessive within the 2023 Swachh rankings, Indore’s title stands out. It sees itself as a mannequin metropolis and has acquired a global fame of kinds for cleansing up its act on sanitation and waste administration, which type the premise of Swachh rankings. The metropolis has been topping the Swachh Bharat surveys since 2016, however that is additionally roughly the interval that NCAP has examined to discover a deterioration within the metropolis’s air.
It’s not laborious to see why the town’s air high quality has been slipping. As the most important business and industrial hub of the area, Indore has urbanised quickly. A 2019 paper – Air Pollution Knowledge Assessments for 20 Indian Cities – revealed in Urban Climate discovered that the constructed-up space in Indore and its neighborhood had grown about 9-fold between 1975 and 2014, the best among the many 20 cities the research checked out. and greater than double the typical enhance (4.2-fold) seen throughout these cities.
Indore has greater than 3,000 micro, small and medium enterprise (MSME) items. Over 500 actual property initiatives are underneath development within the district, in line with Credai. Revenue from property registrations within the metropolis jumped to Rs 1,339 crore, up 7.2%, between April and Oct 2024 in contrast with the corresponding interval final yr, in line with official knowledge.
The metropolis can also be a significant transport hub. Three nationwide highways cross via Indore – NH 52 (a part of the outdated Agra-Mumbai highway), NH 47 (Nagpur-Bamanbore in Gujarat) and NH 347BG (inside MP). Besides, two main state highways, SH 27 and SH 31, run near the town. Indore itself has greater than 20 lakh automobiles. Per the Regional Transport Office, round 8,000 two-wheelers and a pair of,500-3,000 vehicles are registered each month within the metropolis.
“Traffic management has failed to keep pace with the rate of new vehicles hitting the roads. There are substantial emissions from congested traffic, including from vehicle tyres, which are particularly harmful,” says metropolis-based mostly environmentalist OP Joshi.
Not surprisingly, the most important contributor to Indore’s air pollution is the highway mud kicked up by visitors motion. Vehicular emissions come second. Per a supply-apportionment research by Clean Air Catalyst, a flagship program launched by the US Agency for International Development and a world partnership of organizations led by World Resources Institute, highway mud contributes practically three-fourths of the town’s coarse particulate matter (PM10). , with transportation, industries, development and family cooking making up a lot of the relaxation.
Road mud additionally leads within the share of tremendous particulate air pollution (PM2.5) at 55%, adopted by transportation, industries and family cooking.
This is not very unhealthy information for metropolis authorities. Dust administration is the low-hanging fruit amongst air pollution-mitigation measures and does not contain harsh actions impacting folks and livelihoods. “Road dust gets resuspended in the air due to vehicular movement and wind. Continued optimal cleaning of roads would help minimize its impact,” says Prakash Doraiswamy, senior scientist at Clean Air Catalyst and director of air high quality at WRI.
Overall, too, Indore’s location lends it sure pure benefits.
“Unlike the bowl-shaped Indo-Gangetic Plains (IGP) where calm winds and low temperatures lead to an accumulation of pollutants, Indore is a much windier place with an average wind speed of around 11kmph, which blows away a lot of pollution. Also , unlike the alluvial soil in IGP, the black soil in central India kicks up less dust,” says Dipankar Saha, former head of Central Pollution Control Board’s air laboratory division.
“Pristine air quality remains one of our focus areas. We are advocating large-scale plantation and utilizing machinery to sweep roads to minimize dust. To curtail vehicular emissions, we are augmenting our public transport fleet with electric and CNG vehicles,” says Indore divisional Commissioner Deepak Singh.
If applied nicely, these measures ought to make a dent within the metropolis’s PM ranges. However, to carry air pollution right down to India’s secure requirements – 60 μg/m3 yearly for PM10 and 40 μg/m3 for PM2.5 – Indore must do far more. A superb place to start out could be knowledge. The metropolis lately elevated the variety of its air air pollution screens to seven. However, an evaluation by Urban Emissions reveals that the agglomeration of Indore, Dewas, Ujjain, Mhow and Pitampura wants a minimal of 26 screens for particulate matter alone.
Only via granular knowledge can Indore zero in on zones of excessive air pollution to achieve the extent of sanitation within the air that the town appears to have achieved on the bottom.
