Delhi emergency. Start with measurement.
Follow through with diagnosis
Only then will we get to a cure.
Last week as flight cancellations disrupted life and kids were asked to work from home – we had the added confusion of new committees being constituted to solve the air pollution crisis. Again, it ended with a set of mouthpieces. The car mayfacturing lobby is printing reports saying all cars more than three years old should be junked. Judiciary members – not one of which will clear even a basic IIT entrance exam in physics or chemistry are passing laws on everything from car movements to height of mountains.
But where is the data.
Data is not an opinion.
It doest need judgement.
It shows the path to correction.
The starting point is a actual aqi and PM reading at millions of locations in the NCR. Inside, outside, at stations, on the road, in parks. This was identified by the IIT alumni group way back in 2016. We infact set up an office in PHDCCI building just to do that. Ashok Madhukar, the co founder and Patron member of the IIT ALUMNI COUNCIL took two years off from his busy consulting firm to do this pro bono full time. We aggregated resources from around the world.
This included a professor of ai and distributed computing from the University of Edinburgh prof DK Arvind. The then Duke of Edinburgh sanctioned funding for him to study the effects of air pollution on kids. School going kids from Vasant Vihar and other areas who had respiratory issues were given sensors that fitted comfortably in their school bags. The sensors tracked the air quality in their journey through the day. Including air quality in school, within their homes and on the road. The results were shocking. The tech background is here:
The govt sensors were giving wrong numbers. The media now says the area around the sensors is sprayed with water mist. That explains the reading. But the study went beyond measurement. It got to symptoms. So respiratory monitors checked its effect on the asthmatic kids. They were struggling to breathe. The govt was pretending aqi was reaching 200. Measurement was showing 400 outdoors and 650 indoors. There was no escape.
The path forward became clear. We need Bluetooth sensors worn around the neck connected to the phones. These would measure air quality all day long as a time series. The cost of sensors was Rs 2500 then. A million would cost Rs 250 crores. A startup Kodoy Longevity agreed to build the chips. Ionisers were designed to be built into the sensors. These would throw out an electron cloud which would neutralise positively charged PM2.5 particles.
We did a bunch of studies by buying 250 aqi sensors and giving them to volunteers. The results were very clear. The primary cause of pollution is construction and not vehicles or crop burning. They were contributory factors but not the root cause.