National Pollution Control Day is celebrated on December 2 every year to commemorate the Bhopal Gas tragedy, the biggest and most devastating industrial pollution disaster in the history of mankind.
The National Pollution Preventive Day aims to find preventive measures to avert such tragedies in future by creating awareness among people regarding how to avert and fight pollution. Various laws have been declared by the government in order to control and prevent pollution.
On this day it has been once again found that Gwalior is the most polluted city in the state. This is despite the fact that 14 various departments had earlier integrated together to make the City Specific Plan, a supposedly cohesive plan to control air pollution.
However, the ground reality is far from satisfying as the Air Quality Index of the city stands at an unsafe and hazardous 158.6, which is much higher than that of the other leading cities in the state.
While Jabalpur has an AQI of 92.3, Indore has 116.4 and Bhopal 139.2.
This is despite the fact that the number of vehicles in these cities is much more than that of Gwalior.
It is clear from these statistics that the authorities have miserably failed to proactively lead the battle against pollution.
While it is true that the city has seen some development during the last decade it is also true that the development has come at the cost of increasing pollution.
With the increasing standard of living of the people more and more vehicles are seen on the roads, along with a huge number of dusty construction sites all around, but the authorities don’t seem to have any clue as to how to regulate the pollution from these vehicles and construction sites.
The authorities need to tackle this serious problem in a systematic manner to reduce the huge burden of associated health issues.
For starters, the authorities can consider putting in place tighter vehicle emission norms, harsher penalties for burning rubbish in the open and most importantly better control of road and construction site dust. They can also think about replacing all diesel vehicles with battery operated ones.