More than a decade after India last revised its air quality benchmarks, a parliamentary panel has urged the Union government to move quickly on updating the National Ambient Air Quality Standards.

According to a report tabled in the Lok Sabha on Friday (December 12), the committee asked that the revised standards be notified “at the earliest”, news agency PTI reported.

India’s current National Ambient Air Quality Standards were notified in 2009, when permissible limits were set for 12 air pollutants. Earlier versions of the standards were introduced in the early 1980s and subsequently revised in 1994 and 1997.

The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Science and Technology, Environment, Forests and Climate Change pointed out that the standards have not been updated for over 14 years.

In its report, the panel also recommended that all manual air quality monitoring stations in the Delhi-NCR region be upgraded to continuous ambient air quality monitoring systems.

Citing the committee’s findings, PTI reported that the existing network in Delhi is “heavily skewed” towards central and southern parts of the city, areas that are relatively less populated, greener and more affluent.

This uneven spread of monitoring stations results in “a distorted and non-representative dataset”, the report said, as it systematically leaves out more polluted, densely populated and less affluent neighbourhoods.

The panel further noted that most of the six new continuous monitoring stations proposed for Delhi are also planned in greener zones such as the JNU campus, while the trans-Yamuna region has “again been left out”.

The committee recommended that the Union Environment Ministry reconsider the proposed locations so that air quality monitoring stations are more evenly distributed across the national capital and the wider National Capital Region.

The panel’s concerns echo findings from a recent report by the Delhi-based Center for Science and Environment (CSE), which highlighted the uneven distribution of monitoring stations across Delhi’s 1,483 sq km area.

According to the CSE, large parts of southwest, northwest and peripheral Delhi have very few stations, with monitoring coverage extending to only 26% of the city within a 2-km radius and leaving a 74% data shadow.

The parliamentary panel also flagged the high GST imposed on air purifiers and HEPA filters.

As per the PTI report, the committee observed that it was contradictory to levy a prohibitive tax on devices used by citizens for personal protection at a time when efforts to control air pollution have fallen short.