Swachh Vayu Sarvekshan (Clean Air Survey) : Ranking of Cities
Recently the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) has launched the ‘Clean Air Survey (SVS)’ ranking of cities.
Swachh Vayu Sarvekshan SVS will rank 131 cities in the country for implementing urban action plans.
An urban action plan has been prepared under the National Clean Air Program (NACP) 2019.
Under these schemes, a target has been set to reduce air pollution by 40% by the year 2025-26.
Salient Features of Clean Air Survey
- The ranking is based on the work done by cities in various sectors to improve air quality. It will not rank cities on the measure of air quality parameters.
- Cities are required to do self-assessment as per the framework given on ‘PRANA’ online portal. ‘PRAN’ (Portal for Regulation of Air pollution in Non-Attainment cities) has been launched to monitor the implementation of NCAP.
The 131 cities are classified on the basis of population into the following three groups:
- 47 cities with population above 10 lakh,
- 44 cities with population of 3 to 10 lakh and
- 40 cities with population less than 3 lakhs.
Cash prizes will be awarded to the three best performing cities in each group in the spirit of competitive federalism.
NCAP was initiated by MoEFCC. Under this, a target has been set to reduce the concentration of air pollutant particles (PM10 and PM2.5) by 20 to 30 percent. For this the pollution levels of the year 2017 will be used as the basis.
It covers 132 most polluted or non-attainment cities in India. These are the cities whose air quality does not meet the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAOS-National Ambient Air Quality Standards) from 2011 to 2015.
Source – PIB
