The air quality of the Capital remained ‘very poor’ on Friday and is expected to remain in the same category on Saturday.
Delhi Chief Secretary Vijay Dev has ordered officials of different agencies to take action to control local sources of pollution before November 13, including lifting of construction waste and controlling dust, after the Supreme Court pulled up the government earlier this week.
“Today the wind speed was less in the morning [5-6 km/hr] and towards the evening, it increased to 10-12 km/hr. We are expecting a wind speed of about 20 km/hr tomorrow [Saturday] and day after [Sunday],” said Kuldeep Srivastava, head of regional weather forecasting centre of the IMD. Faster winds help to disperse pollutants and improve the air quality.
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Delhi’s air quality index (AQI) on Friday was 330, up from 309 (very poor) on Thursday, according to the bulletin at 4 p.m. by the Central Pollution Control Board that is the average of the past 24 hours. An AQI between 0-50 is considered ‘good’ and 51-100 ‘satisfactory’.
The contribution of stubble burning in neighbouring States to Delhi’s air pollution was only 3% on Friday and is expected to be 8% on Saturday, said government-run monitoring agency SAFAR. The contribution of stubble burning was as high as 44% earlier this season.
The contribution is less as the wind direction is from the south-east and the number of farm fires was less, but SAFAR warned that it could be because of the cloud cover. “The effective biomass fire count observed on Thursday was 200. It should be noted that Punjab and Haryana were under a heavy cloud cover; and satellite’s capability to detect fires reduces in such a situation,” SAFAR said.
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