Startups and airpollution in India

Start-ups and tackling air pollution:

[pic 1]

In 2016, London was up in arms against an impending “airpocalypse”. The city’s nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter (PM) levels were rivalling those of Beijing, the world’s most polluted city at the time. In response, the London city administration sent out a team of researchers equipped with sensors to get a better sense of the problem. Nothing unusual about that, apart from the fact that the team comprised entirely of pigeons with air quality sensors strapped to their backs. 

According to the World Health Organization, 7 Mn people die each year from air pollution worldwide where as 9 out of 10 people worldwide breath air that contains high level of pollutants.

The problem that London faced is not new to India’s metros where life-threatening triple-digit PM levels have become the norm rather than an exception in the past few years. According to the World Air Quality Index, the air quality in Delhi touched hazardous levels in June this year with the national capital registering an air quality index value of 999.

In order to tackle this issue many start-ups across the country have developed cost effective methods to collect, track, monitor and prevent air pollution using latest technologies.

One such company is Delhi-based Kaiterra that creates highly-accurate monitors that measure a variety of air pollutants, for consumers, businesses and industrial use. These devices allow users to better understand their own air quality, while simultaneously sending a constant stream of pollutant data to the cloud, which is processed, then combined with data from official monitoring stations, satellites and other sources, to create maps of outdoor air quality. This behaviour could be a powerful catalyst in changing people’s mind towards air pollution and bring about change in their behaviour and policies.

Another Delhi-based start-up PerSapien was born out of a mission to protect people's health from growing environmental adversities. They created a nasal-air purification device called “Air lens” that filters out harmful pollutants of magnitudes in the range of PM2.5 to PM10.In addition to the device they have also launched “Air lens” data app which can provide personal level air quality index with tracking feature.

While some solutions like “Air lens” filter are costly products to adapt by all the customer segments of the country some start-ups have managed to provide low cost solution to tackle air pollution. Prateek Sharma, an IIT-Delhi alumnus has started “Nasoclean” that provides nasal filters at just 10rupees that can block harmful air pollutants with minimal hinderance to breathing.

Air pollution in India continues to be a major health affecter and will continue to be so in the coming future due to rapid industrialization in the country without concrete environmental policies. While these start-ups do provide some short-term solutions to the problems in hand understanding the customer needs and preferences, they cannot provide long term solutions and with out radical changes in people behaviour and government policies we are indeed looking at an airpocalypse.

References:

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/small-biz/startups/newsbuzz/making-sense-of-air-quality-using-sensors/articleshow/69262232.cms?from=mdr

...