The Union Minister for Environment, Forest and Climate Change, Bhupender Yadav, will on Tuesday launch the National Clean Air Programme dashboard - PRANA - for the abatement of air pollution in 132 cities. The minister will also inaugurate a smog tower in Delhi.

The smog tower will be inaugurated at Anand Vihar, one of the most polluted areas in the national capital. It will be the ministry's first smog tower in Delhi to be inaugurated about a fortnight after the Delhi government had inaugurated its own smog tower at Baba Kharak Singh Marg.

Ahead of the pollution season next month onwards in north India, both the governments have claimed that the smog towers would be useful in controlling air pollution, a claim denied by the experts.

The inauguration of Delhi government's smog tower led to a war of words with both the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) taking credit for the first steps regarding the tower. As reported by IANS, the smog tower at Baba Kharak Singh Marg was incomplete when it was inaugurated on August 24.

Yadav and Minister of State for Environment, Forest and Climate Change, Ashwini Kumar Choubey, would launch PRANA, the air pollution dashboard that will have real-time information in user-friendly manner for all polluting parameters that are being monitored in 132 cities that are currently under the National Clean Air Programme (NCAP).

The dashboard has been developed by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change along with GIZ, an arm of the German government working in tandem with several Indian ministries and states on environmental issues.

These 132 cities would be part of a national mission once the framework is ready and the NCAP would be subsumed in it, Yadav had told IANS earlier this month.

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