Government moves to make dust mitigation a priority

The Ministry of Environment has asked government agencies involved in plethora of construction activities in Delhi to take effective steps to ensure dust mitigation at the construction sites to bring down air pollution. The ministry had recently called a meeting comprising senior officials of agencies like NHAI, DMRC, PWD, etc where this message was conveyed.

“ A series of strong messages were conveyed by the Ministry of Environment. For instance, if dust mitigation is not undertaken at the construction site, strict action would be taken against the official of the agency supervising the execution of that project. Spreading of dust in the environment due to the ongoing construction projects especially for infrastructure facelift has to be controlled and that was the key message of this meeting,” a highly placed source told Iamrenew. While, in the popular perception, carbon emissions from vehicles (Delhi has the highest number of vehicles among all metros in the country) is believed to be the main culprit for the air pollution plight of the national capital, a report released by a leading environment monitoring agency last year had cited construction as an equally responsible factor amounting to as much as 25-30 percent of city’s bad to severe air condition. During the early part of last November when Delhi was under the grip of severe smog conditions, NGT had initiated a series of preventive measures which, among other things, had also included a two weeks ban on all construction activities in the national capital.

For dust mitigation on the construction sites, a series of measures were also extensively discussed in the meeting which was chaired by C K Mishra, Secretary, Environment Ministry. These included MCD deploying water tankers for the road stretches where mechanized sweeping is not possible. MCD has also been instructed to expedite its mechanized sweeping machine procurement drive which is slated to complete before the end of this year.

By Ritwik Sinha

Published on: Mar 26, 2018