Air Quality

We began our journey in Asar with building a national ‘Clean Air Collective’. This network, the largest collective on air quality in India, focuses on fostering collaboration among diverse stakeholders, like government authorities, policymakers, citizen groups, and scientists, to address air pollution challenges. It has grown from 10 members to more than 200 working across 15 states and 50 cities in India.

We also curate and coordinate the Clean Air City Action Hubs in 13 cities across Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Punjab, and West Bengal, where we bring together local authorities and civil society to ensure the effective implementation of clean air action plans and National Clean Air Programme (NCAP). With over 300 members across city hubs, we are actively working along with our partners in constructively engaging with government departments to reduce exposure to air pollution levels and exposure to health impacts from it in the respective cities.

Point of Contact:

Natasha Chandy
Head of Programme, Air Quality
natasha.chandy@asar.co.in

Impact:

Facilitates the Clean Air Collective, an lose and unbranded network, to align on strategy, complement each other's work, and to amplify impact through collaborations. The Collective enables learning across states, access to experts, sharing of information across the ecosystem.

Media coverage of air quality issues across the four states by enhancing journalists’ understanding of the issue. Through workshops, we helped journalists, especially reporting in the regional language, with access to information, and local experts. Over 700 journalists have attended our media workshops over the years.

Our engagement with municipalities has resulted in a policy-level decision by Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation’s (BMC) to shelve their smog tower plan, Amritsar approving the Pink Auto Scheme and providing 80 women a means to livelihood, nine additional Continuous Air Quality Monitoring Stations installed in Dhanbad. We also sustained decentralised municipality waste management efforts in Durgapur, Nagpur, and Aurangabad.