India's Ambitious Air Clean-up Plan: Where Did ₹11,000 Crore Go?
In 2019, India came up with the National Clean Air Programme. An analysis of its meetings reveals troubling details.
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Since 2019, the Government of India, under the National Clean Air Programme (NCAP) and 15th Finance Commission grant, has released Rs 11,210.75 crore to 'improve air quality' in 130 cities across states.
But a detailed analysis of the minutes of 46 NCAP Committee meetings by The Quint revealed that in at least 68 of these target cities, the utilisation of the funds was less than 75 percent. The situation is particularly grim in cities such as Noida in Uttar Pradesh and Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh where only 11 and 14 percent of the allotted funds have been utilised.
An analysis of data furnished by several State Pollution Control Boards (SPCBs) also showed irregularities in the release of funding under the initiative, and in many cases use of funds on irrelevant, dust-management activities that have no impact on air quality improvement.
What is the National Clean Air Programme?
The Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) in 2019 launched the NCAP with a national-level goal to reduce the concentration of Particulate Matter (PM 2.5 and PM 10) in target cities by 20-40% by 2025-26.
PM 10 and PM 2.5 — along with Carbon Monoxide, Nitrogen Oxide, and Sulphur Dioxide — are among the main pollutants of air.
The programme also aimed to scale up air pollution monitoring and forecasting, conduct pollution source apportionment studies, and develop city-specific Air Action Plans.
Funding under this initiative flows via two major channels:
Fund allocated by MoEFCC to 82 cities under the NCAP programme.
Direct funding from the 15th Finance Commission grant to the 42 cities and seven urban agglomerations with more than a million population, also called the Million-Plus Cities Challenge Fund.
The NCAP is also a first of its kind, performance-linked programme where cities have to demonstrate improvement in air quality to access the fund.
The Report Card
With the programme set to reach its deadline in less than two years, as many as 43 out of 131 target cities have shown less than 20 percent improvement in PM 10 concentration, while 31 cities have shown no improvement at all.
Further, the Source Apportionment study, meant to identify the sources of air pollutants and estimating their contribution to air pollution levels, was still under process in 80 out of 131 target cities and six cities were yet to submit their Hotspot Action Plans as in October 2024.
In 12 cities, fund utilisation was below 40 percent.
"The problem of pollution cannot be solved by pumping in money alone. There has to be a political will, which is clearly lacking," Chennai-based environment writer and researcher Nithyanand Jayaram told The Quint.
"If despite being a performance-linked initiative, the programme has large amount of unutilised funds and fails to yield significant results, it means that the implementation system is broken. The implementation in this case largely relies on State Pollution Control Boards, which we've known for very long, are neither adequately staffed nor answerable to anybody," he added.
While the programme was initially aimed to curb the concentration of PM 2.5 and PM 10 to improve air quality in target cities, only PM 10 concentration is being considered for performance assessment. This, the environment ministry, in one of its annual reports, had attributed to a lack of monitoring stations for PM 2.5.
"We can send rocket to space but not set up enough monitoring stations for PM 2.5 in 131 Indian cities? Like I said, there is a clear lack of intent to solve the problem of pollution," Jayaram added.
PM 2.5 is a tinier sub set of PM10 and poses a greater health risk as it penetrates deeper into the lungs, entering the bloodstream and affecting nearly all human organs.
Zooming in on The Delhi-NCR Region
For much of this week, starting Monday, 18 November, pollution levels in north India hit their highest of this pre-winter season with visibility in several cities, including New Delhi dropping to 100 meters.
Several among the most polluted cities in the country during this time fall under the Delhi-NCR region. These include Delhi, Gurugram, Bahadurgarh, Ghaziabad, Sonipat, and Noida.
In this region, Delhi, Noida, Ghaziabad, and Faridabad get funds under the NCAP. Utilisation of these funds is poor across the region. For instance, Delhi has been allotted Rs 42.69 crore under the programme, of which it used only Rs 13.56 crore. Noida used 11.14 percent of funds released, Faridabad used 38.91 percent of its fund.
The only exception was Ghaziabad which had utilised 97 percent of the fund released under the initiative.
What Was The Money Spent On?
During NCAP's 15th implementation committee meeting on 24 November 2023, the MoEFCC presented area-wise expenditure data sourced from target cities. The data showed that 63.68 percent of the total funding received by states and cities was spent on actions amounting to dust management. These include activities such as paving roads, covering potholes, and deploying mechanical sweepers and water sprinklers.
Only 0.61 percent was spent on activities concerning industrial pollution control, while 12.63 percent was spent on vehicular pollution.
Delhi, for instance, spent 100 percent of its utilised funding (which was 31.76 percent of the total funding it received) on purchase of 14 Mechanical Road Sweepers, 28 Water Sprinklers and Anti-Smog Guns, and 2 pothole repairing and road patching machines. This data was furnished by the Delhi Pollution Control Committee (DPCC) in a report on 10 October 2024.
Most cities focused on dust management activities because NCAP considers PM 10 levels for performance assessment, but source apportionment studies from these cities, including Delhi, have shown industries and vehicles to be the biggest polluters of air in the region.
During its implementation committee meeting in October 2024, the NCAP also recognised the issue of expenditure of funds on irrelevant activities which have no impact on air quality improvement.
These activities included using NCAP funds to pay electricity bills of Construction & Demolition (C&D) Waste Management Plants, installation of street light, procurement of sewage equipment, installation of CCTV cameras at dumping sites, and cleaning of waste water ponds among others.
Partner cities were advised to avoid spending money on these activities.
"Just having a clean air programme in select cities cannot fix India's pollution problem. We need to go beyond optics. If you look at the thermal power plants in different locations...for years they've been delaying implementation of sulphur dioxide emission norms. Every time the deadline comes up, the ministry of environment issues another notification, kicking the can down the road. There has to be a plan in place but at the same time, we need political will to execute that plan," Nithyanand Jayaram said.
(The Quint has reached out to the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change and the State Pollution Control Boards mentioned above comments. The story will updated when we hear from them.)