Reacting, last week, to reports that air pollution killed 1.1 million Indians in 2015, Environment Minister Anil Dave told a press conference, “We seem to be far more influenced by things out of India. Of the 124 Indian cities, whose pollution figures are available in the WHO database, only 8 had direct PM 2.5 measurements. According to the CPCB publication — by far the only available government critique of this methodology — this conversion is problematic as air quality monitoring machines varied widely in their measurements even within the same city. In some cases PM2.5 was only 8% of PM 10 and other cases 86%, according to a 2014 assessment of air quality parameters in Delhi by the CPCB. “The average thus works out to about 47%,” D. Saha of the CPCB and one of the authors of the report told The Hindu.

Source: The Hindu February 27, 2017 21:04 UTC