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:(( Central Pollution Control Board, available at https://cpcb.nic.in/about-namp/.))
- 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.