Safe and Sustainable Gurgaon

Air pollution is one of the health risks that the world faces today. Globally, air pollution kills over 65 lakh people every year. The effect of air pollution is worse for children. The World Health Organization’s report on air pollution and child health highlights the damaging impact of air pollution on the health and survival of children. The report estimates that 180 crores or 93% of the world's children breathe toxic air. A third of these are children under the age of five. In 2018, as per the World Air Quality Report, Gurugram was observed to be the most polluted city in the world with an average Air Quality Index (AQI) of 135.8 µg/m³ which is way above the safe limit.

One of the key reasons for this toxic air is PM 2.5, and ultra-fine particulate matter with a size of 2.5 micrometers. Just for comparison, PM2.5 is 40 times smaller than a human hair. These particles often constitute toxic organic compounds and heavy metals. Due to their small size, they can travel deep into our body and infiltrate our lungs and even our bloodstream, causing serious diseases like lung cancer.

There are two sources of air pollution – continuous and episodic. Continued sources are those that emit all-round the year like transport, power plants, etc. Episodic sources are those that emit a certain time of the year like crop burning, Diwali, etc. There are no detailed studies for what makes Gurugram’s air so toxic but the studies for Delhi are very relatable to Gurugram. As per the TERI study of 2018, motor vehicle exhaust is the major source of pollutants emitted from within Delhi; contributing to about 40% of PM2.5, 20% of PM10, and more than 80% of NOx, CO, etc.

As cities look to ease the lockdown and provide safe, affordable, and equitable modes of transport while ensuring physical social distancing, the need for developing cycle tracks and pedestrianization of market spaces through walking and cycling-friendly cities is of utmost importance. The pandemic COVID-19 presents us with an opportunity to reimagine streets for people. To make major streets and market areas people-friendly, the need of the hour is for Indian cities to consider developing more walkways and cycle tracks.

A toolkit shall be prepared based on learnings from the project, to facilitate the scale-up of similar initiatives across the country. The partnership shall seek to ensure that the toolkit gets formally adopted as a standard for cycling-friendly cities in India. The toolkit will be completed over a period of 1 year from the start of this project.

Improving the Gurugram transport system will surely improve the cities’ air quality. Also, it will help in improving the road safety situation in the city and will provide greater access to opportunities for the residents. Gurugram’s mobility profile suggested that this is doable.

Raahgiri Foundation intends to initiate the Safe and Sustainable Gurugram project that will aim to reduce health and the burden of citizens by improving the routes and modes used in the city. The idea is to implement integrated solutions like the safer street design so that people can shift to sustainable modes of transport which will help reduce environmental damage and campaigns like Raahgiri Days to encourage a healthy lifestyle and counter the ill-effects of air pollution and other environmental risks.

The objective of the project shall be to ensure its sustainability within the proposed state and scale-up to other streets. The partnership shall build the technical capacity of the partners and raise stakeholder awareness, to ensure sustainability.