‘Most polluted’ Begusarai: a striking finding, based on inadequate data

These rankings have been released by a little-known Swiss technology company called IQAir, which also sells air purifiers, air quality monitoring units, and US$125 face masks.

The rankings have been made by using data “obtained from ground-level air monitoring stations” and aggregated from “a combination of regulatory air quality monitoring equipment and low-cost air quality sensors”, operated by a “diverse range of entities” including government agencies, educational institutions, non-profit organisations, and even “individual citizens”.

Why Begusarai?

There is nothing very special about Begusarai, located in eastern Bihar, though. It is not an industrial town, and it does not have any obvious source of local generation of pollutants. This is also true of the other Bihar towns in the most-polluted list. So what makes Begusarai the most polluted of all?

“We do not have very good data on sources of pollution in these towns. These are not heavily industrialised areas, and I would suspect they would not have very heavy vehicular emissions as well. So, if I have to make an intelligent guess, I would say that the bulk of these pollutants might be coming from solid fuel burning,” Sachchida Nand Tripathi, Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering and Department of Sustainable Energy at IIT Kanpur, said. “Solid waste burning could also be a major contributor,” he said.

Source: World Air Quality Report 2023, IQAir

Dr Tripathi, one of India’s most eminent experts on air pollution, said that despite the success of schemes such as Ujjwala in many parts of the country, a significant number of rural households may be still burning solid fuels for cooking.

Also, “Towns in Bihar are affected by pollutants that are transported from the northern region — Punjab, Haryana, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh — during some seasons because of atmospheric conditions,” he said.

Insufficient data

The general trend in these rankings is not very different from what has emerged in similar assessments in the past by the World Health Organisation (WHO) or academic and research institutions. Several locations in Bihar have figured in previous lists of towns with the worst air quality in India.

However, zeroing in on a particular city or town as the worst polluted may not be accurate. The data that is publicly available comes from relatively few monitoring stations.

The most dense network of air quality sensors and monitors in Bihar has been set up by Dr Tripathi’s team at IIT Kanpur in association with the state and central governments, with at least one monitoring station in every block of the state.

More than 500 monitors have been collecting air quality data from Bihar for the past one year, but this data is not yet in the public domain. The network, called AMRIT, or Ambient Air Quality Monitoring over Rural Areas using Indigenous Technology, was formally inaugurated only this month by Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar.

Annual and seasonal averages from this dataset show that several districts in Bihar were considerably more polluted than Begusarai.

“The differences in the pollution levels in various towns of Bihar are not that much. No one town seems to be significantly more polluted than the other. It is only now that this area is being monitored properly, and it will take some time for a good assessment to be made about the causes and reasons for bad air quality in this area,” Dr Tripathi said.