Publication Year: 2025

Strengthening the Scientific Foundations of NCAP: Building a Standardised Framework for Source Apportionment and Emission Inventories

Introduction

India’s first comprehensive action plan for air quality management in cities, the National Clean Air Programme (NCAP), was launched by the Ministry of Environment, Forests, and Climate Change (MoEF&CC) in 2019. The programme initially aimed to achieve a 20–30% reduction in PM10 and PM2.5 concentrations by 2024 across 102 identified cities with an emphasis on PM2.5 due to its significant health impacts. In 2022, the Non-Attainment Cities (NACs) list was revised to include 130 cities. In parallel, PM10 was designated as the pollutant of interest, with its reduction as the metric of progress, due to limitations in PM2.5 baseline data. The programme goal was revised to achieve a 40% reduction in PM10 levels, or attainment of national ambient air quality standards
(NAAQS), by 2025–26 in the NACs.

The 130 NACs were chosen based on an analysis of 2017 manual monitoring data from the National Ambient Air Quality Monitoring Programme (NAMP). Among these, more than 40 cities with over a million residents received air quality performance grants through the 15th Finance Commission’s Million-Plus City Challenge Fund. The remaining cities are supported under the ‘Control of Pollution’ budgetary head of the MoEF&CC. Consequently, cities lacking functional monitoring stations or those that did not fulfil the requirement (cities that exceeded NAAQS for five consecutive years from three monitoring stations) were excluded from the NAC classification. This has resulted in the omission of several other polluted cities (such as Ranchi and Howrah) from the NCAP non-attainment list.

The NCAP vision document also outlined a vision for “comprehensive, multi-scale, and cross-sectoral” action to address not only sources within the remit of the MoEF&CC but also those outside it. It also sought to mainstream air pollution action through existing programmes such as the Smart Cities Mission. Additionally, it aimed to convene sector-specific working groups (such as with the Ministry of Power (MoP) to focus on emissions from thermal power plants and the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH) on vehicular emissions) to promote broader action on pollution mitigation. However, there has been little documented progress on the constitution of these working groups, the development of sectoral action plans, or the integration with other programmes.

Based on NCAP goals, the 130 non-attainment cities prepared city action plans detailing source-specific interventions categorised as short-, medium-, and long-term measures, which the CPCB subsequently approved. These city action plans, meant to be backed by analyses that determine source-specific emissions, form the basis for how cities are supposed to approach air quality action under the NCAP. However, five years into the programme, most cities have yet to complete their source apportionment (SA) or emissions inventory (EI) studies, and their role in determining city-level actions remains unclear. In this brief, we highlight the significance of SA and EI studies as the backbone of effective air quality management, and explain why India needs to strengthen its approach to conducting these studies to integrate them into policy actions.

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Different Paths to Clean Air: Global Insights for India’s Reform Agenda

Summary

India’s air pollution crisis cannot be solved without addressing key structural and institutional constraints, such as reforming our environmental regulatory regime – one that remains under-capacitated, poorly equipped, and under-funded. Previous works have examined their capacities, constraints, and performance in isolation to understand why frontline environmental regulators in India struggle to meet their mandate. Our new issue brief presents a comparative analysis of learnings from diverse air quality regimes and charts a roadmap for building a capable and forward-looking environmental regulatory regime in India.

We study how countries across the Global South and North, such as Brazil, China, Germany, Mexico, Poland, South Korea, and the USA, have built and reformed their air quality regimes, and what India can learn from them to address the challenges ahead. These countries were chosen to be comparable and relevant to India, and the group is therefore a mix of countries with large economies, a history of dealing with high air pollution, and rapid industrialisation coupled with high GDP growth. The varied source profiles, regulatory institutions, history of air pollution policymaking, and differing governance regimes (unitary vs. federal) in these countries also present differing approaches that could inform Indian policymaking on air quality.

Table 1: Sampling parameters for the 7 countries

We highlight trends and examples relevant to India – how countries set health-based standards, strengthen accountability for action, scale air quality monitoring, and manage airsheds.

Key Learnings

1. Science plays a fundamental role in establishing strict, health-based air quality standards
2. Strong focus on PM2.5 reductions through top-down or bottom-up approaches, depending on country contexts
3. Large increases in monitoring capacity alone may not necessarily yield spatial and temporal representativeness
4. Indian regulators are comparatively resource-poor
5. Airshed-level governance is gaining importance and requires nested governance
6. Accountability is a catalyst for sustained improvements in air quality

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Air Pollution: Public Health Impacts and Policy Measures

Introduction

Air pollution and its impact on human health represent a slow and ongoing public health emergency. The detrimental effects of air pollution span from respiratory and cardiovascular diseases to adverse pregnancy outcomes and developmental problems in children and contribute to premature mortality across the developed and developing world. Air pollution, including microscopic PM and gaseous pollutants, can harm lung function and affect the cardiovascular system by causing oxidative stress, inflammation, altered heart rhythms, and disruptions in blood pressure. PM2.5 (PM smaller than 2.5 microns) can also penetrate deep into the lungs and bloodstream, affecting multiple organs and systems (Izzotti et al. 2022). The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has classed PM2.5 as a cause of lung cancers, building on evidence showcasing the carcinogenic effects of both vehicular diesel pollution and coal-burning emissions (Balakrishnan et al. 2015).

The 2019 India sub-national burden of disease study estimated that exposure to ambient and household air pollution contributed to 1.67 million deaths and 53.5 million disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) lost, amounting to 17.8% of total deaths and 11.5% of total DALYs, respectively. The economic loss associated with this exposure was estimated at $36.8 billion or 1.36% of GDP (A. Pandey et al. 2020). More recent results using similar approaches indicate an increase in air pollution’s burden of death to over 2.1 million deaths annually in India (State of Global Air 2024). Death rates from various sources of air pollution have changed substantially since 1990, with death rates from ambient PM2.5 increasing by 115.3% and that from household air pollution (primarily from traditional biomass-burning cookstoves) declining by 64.2%.

While the declines in household air pollution impacts are heartening, the increases in death rates from ambient air pollution are only likely to increase in the coming years, with India rapidly urbanising and industrialising. Many of the world’s most polluted cities in the world are in India, several of them tier-2 and 3 cities (IQ Air 2023). Combined with the growing evidence base on air pollution’s health impacts and the need to capitalise on its demographic dividend, there is a greater urgency than ever to tackle the all-pervasive challenge of air pollution.
 

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