Are you waiting for people to die due to pollution, SC asks Centre

The Supreme Court on Thursday asked whether the Centre wants to wait till people start dying due to alarming levels of air pollution, slamming the government after it was told that there were only a few air quality monitoring stations in Delhi, none in the National Capital Region and no graded response plan in place to deal with any contingencies.

A bench, led by Chief Justice of India TS Thakur, pulled up the Central Pollution Control Board ( CPCB) for doing things in an ad hoc manner and demanded that the Narendra Modi government step up its efforts to set up a graded response plan.

Such a plan should fix responsibility of officials tasked with implementing immediate steps to deal with the situation including shutting down schools and colleges, industry and construction, taking steps to improve air quality and warning people to move out to other areas to avoid the adverse health effects of alarming levels of pollution, it said.

"You want to wait till people start dying. Your response is sluggish.People are gasping for breath and you have no plan," the CJI said.

"You can't be in a situation in which air pollution touches dangerous levels but you have no plan or response to either take localised steps to contain a situation such as shut down construction and industry," he said.

As Solicitor General Ranjit Kumar conceded that the key problem is ineffective implementation by agencies to which the CPCB submits its reports on ambient air quality, the CJI said, "You need to have a plan. You don't seem to have a plan. Your approach is very ad hoc." The CPCB told the court that it has only three such monitoring stations in Delhi, the Delhi Pollution Control Board has six and the Department of Earth Sciences or IMD has nine. There is no air quality monitoring station in NCR, it said.