What is the National Air Quality Monitoring Programme?

The Central Pollution Control Board established the National Air Quality Monitoring Programme (NAMP) to track air quality across 29 states and 6 union territories. The aim of NAMP is to:¹

• Determine the status and trends of ambient air quality.
• Determine whether the prescribed ambient air quality standards are being violated.
• Identify cities that do not meet the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) over a 5-year period consistently and designate them as non-attainment cities.
• Gather knowledge and proper understanding for developing preventive and corrective measures.
• Understand the natural cleaning process taking place in the environment through pollution dilution, dispersion, wind-based movement, dry deposition, precipitation and chemical transformation of pollutants.

The NAMP monitors the four major pollutants as part of the AQI – sulphur dioxide, oxides of nitrogen, respirable particulate matter and fine particulate matter. It also checks wind speed and direction along with relative humidity and temperature.

The NAMP is a result of the joint efforts of the Central Pollution Control Board, State Pollution Control Boards, Pollution Control Committees and National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (NEERI), Nagpur.

1. Central Pollution Control Board, available at  https://cpcb.nic.in/about-namp/. [↩]