LAHORE: The Punjab Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has stopped monitoring the Air Quality Index (AQI) of the provincial metropolis by making excuses that the air monitoring stations (Airpointers) are undergoing maintenance work, Pakistan Today has observed. The matter of not monitoring the air quality by the provincial government was also taken up in the Lahore High Court (LHC) where EPA officials promised to publish the real-time data on its website on a daily basis. The EPA somehow managed to monitor the AQI for about one month but could not share the complete data accumulated by all monitoring stations. Reliable sources inside the EPA informed this scribe that the department stopped monitoring the air quality after its monitoring stations started reporting inaccurate AQI data. “While preparing the air quality monitoring results, the EPA has ignored the weather conditions of a particular area,” he said.

Source: Pakistan Today December 15, 2017 16:07 UTC