What is GRAP, the National Capital Region’s plan to tackle air pollution?
Understanding the Graded Response Action Plan – and why it has not worked.
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From 8 am on Monday, as a thick layer of smog enveloped the Delhi-National Capital Region, stage-IV of the Graded Response Action Plan was put into action.
This came the day after the Air Quality Index slid into the “severe+” category, breaching the 450 mark. An AQI of more than 400 “may cause respiratory impact even on healthy people, and serious health impacts on people with lung/heart disease”, warns a release from the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change. “The health impacts may be experienced even during light physical activity.”
An AQI below 100 is considered satisfactory, but even that may cause breathing discomfort to sensitive people.
GRAP is a series of emergency measures that are put into place by the Commission for Air Quality Management as pollution levels rise to specified measures in the Delhi-NCR – which consists of Delhi and parts of Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan – to prevent the air quality deteriorating even further.
Just arrived back in Delhi to find the city embalmed in an all-enveloping burial shroud of pollution. Even at 2pm impossible to see 100m across the runway.
I've never seen anything like this in forty years of living here. What a fate for the City of Djinns- still, at its best the…...
