Only nine among India’s 102 cities have a city-specific clean air plan with an outlined budget for the execution of the proposed air pollution mitigation activities, according to a joint study by Delhi-based think tank Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW) and a Delhi-based research organisation Urban Emissions.

"About 90 per cent of India’s 102 approved city-specific clean air plans do not have a budget outlined for the execution of the proposed air pollution mitigation activities," CEEW-Urban Emissions said in a statement recently.

Apart from this, more than 75 per cent of the plans do not contain crucial information on emissions from different polluting sources, leading to replication of action points and timelines across many highly polluted cities across the country, said the study.

Tanushree Ganguly, a researcher at CEEW and co-author of the study said, “The clampdown on all non-essential activities because of the pandemic and the resultant decline in pollution levels have made the environmental footprint of economic activity in our cities extremely evident,"

The National Clean Air Programme (NCAP) launched in January 2019 had listed the preparation and implementation of city-specific air quality management plans as a primary mitigation measure for reducing PM 2.5 concentration by 20 per cent to 30 per cent by 2024.

However, the CEEW-Urban Emissions study finds that 14 of Uttar Pradesh’s 15 non-attainment cities have identical plans. So is the case in multiple cities in Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Nagaland, Odisha, Rajasthan and Uttarakhand.

In the Union Budget for 2020-21, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had allocated Rs 4,400 crore for implementation of NCAP. However, the study finds that only nine cities have listed budgetary requirements for executing the action points listed.

Overall, the study states that the plans stand as a collection of measures without specified goals and priorities. Besides this, lack of a national emission inventory and the absence of a standard protocol for air pollution emission reporting across states are hindering the setting of emission reduction targets, the study said.