East Delhi municipal corp prepares action plan to fight air pollution

The East Delhi Municipal Corporation has launched a year-long action plan to fight air pollution in regions under its jurisdiction. Department authorities have thus been given the responsibility to control road dust, biomass burning, open waste burning, construction and demolition dust, solid waste management and industrial emission control. Additional staff will be used to control these in the winter months from October to March. EDMC commissioner Vikas Anand told the media that the plan is to avoid setbacks in executing initiatives for pollution mitigation. The effort is to develop the overall environmental condition in EDMC areas. They would upload the action plan on their website, and people can view the contact details of authorities responsible for the execution of individual plans. With the contact number of the authorities available, now any resident can report pollution-producing action to them. The project will also be updated from time to time with more initiatives. A specific winter activity will be to clean the 162.2 km of roads less than 60 ft wide and 120 km of those over 60 ft of dust. For roads broader than 60 ft, 10 mechanised road-sweepers, each provided with water sprinklers, will be used and the aimed road length to be cleaned per day is 350-400 km. Sanitation workers will manually clean the narrower roads. Every day, 16,000 litres of treated water will be utilised to sprinkle the roads and settle the dust. A dust control and management cell has been fixed to manage and execute the road dust control measures. Officers on a special duty will survey to recognise the areas of garbage and C&D waste dumping and burning while coordinating with other agencies on the elimination of such material. They will also work against known polluters and address grievances received on social media. Long-term actions commenced involving establishing at least one fixed or mobile compactor and one material recovery plant in each ward for the biomining of 50 lakh tonne of legacy waste and elimination of excavated material. Bulk waste producers and owners or builders have been directed to discharge their construction and demolition waste at the processing facility in Shastri Park or face penalties. Collaboration with firms and NGOs for developing the environmental conditions is also part of the long-term measures. The action strategy records, for example, that TERI has been active in teaching the bulk solid waste generators about the need for waste segregating and processing and notifying them about the technology available for such work. Image SourceAlso read: East Delhi civic body mandates C&D waste disposal at C&D plant only