Transport options driven by fossil fuels, poor waste management (due to waste burning), emissions from industry, and road dust are among the top common components of air pollution in the non-attainment cities.

Speaking to The Hindu, Centre for Study of Science, Technology and Policy (CSTEP) Executive Director Jai Asundi said the think-tank was making customised clean air action plans for non-attainment cities across the country whose air quality do not conform to the national ambient air quality standards.

The overall story of India’s solar power sector is one of extraordinary growth. India has grown its solar power capacity from 2.5 GW in 2014 to almost 36 GW today. Of this, over 30 GW capacity is generated by ground-mounted solar power plants, such as the Bhadla Solar Park in Rajasthan and the Pavagada Solar Park in Karnataka — both developed by the Government of India under the National Solar Mission — among others.

Early November, the Ministry of Finance announced that a total amount of INR 2,200 crore would be transferred to 40 cities with a million-plus population to aid in improving air quality. This is in alignment with the National Clean Air Action Programme (NCAP), launched in January 2019 by the Government of India, which aims to cut pollution by 20-30% in 122 non-attainment cities by 2024. This funding would be the first tranche of a total INR 4,400 crore support the 15th Finance Commission announced in February 2020.

Changes in the climate system over tens of thousands of years brought about ice ages and interglacial warming periods. Science confirms that climate change, which is a large-scale and long-term change in the earth’s weather patterns, is human-induced and not due to natural causes.

Globally, the past five years have been the hottest on record, extreme weather events such as heat waves, floods, and droughts have gone up five-fold, and economic losses have increased seven-fold over the past 50 years.

Synchrotron x-ray diffraction measurements on powder 2H-MoTe2 (P63/mmc) up to ~46 GPa have been performed along with first-principles based density functional theoretical analysis to probe the isostructural transition in low pressure regime and two electronic topological transitions (ETT) of Lifshitz-type in high pressure regime. The low pressure isostructural transition at ~7 GPa is associated with the lattice parameter ratio c/a anomaly and the change in the compressibility of individual layers.

Nearly 4 million commercial vehicles in India are expected to ride into the sunset soon. The much awaited vehicle scrappage policy, expected to be notified shortly by the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH), aims to scrap older commercial (more than 15 years) and private vehicles (more than 20 years). Currently, the total number of vehicles older than 15 years in the country is around 28 million (including all categories), of which nearly 4 million are commercial.

Electrification is a key solution to growing levels of vehicle pollution in metropolises and is of particular importance to India today. The automotive industry is already feeling the effects of electrification, both globally and in India. As environmental regulations become more binding, many fleets have started to recognize the need for electrification. Integrating electric or hybrid electric vehicles into the fleet portfolio helps address sustainability and environmental goals.

Batteries are commonly employed as energy storage systems for PV stand-alone microgrid. The instantaneous, diurnal, and seasonal variation in load and PV generation degrades the battery rapidly. This affects the life cycle cost of the system. This paper aims to combine battery storage with supercapacitor (short term) and hydrogen storage (long term) and investigate and compare the reliability and annualised life cycle cost of the system with manufacturers given life and by incorporating battery degradation. 

The deluge of recent calamities including Cyclone Amphan, floods in Assam, Maharashtra, and Karnataka, and the wildfires in California and Oregon bears testimony to the recurrence of climate crises in rapid succession. In fact, the year 2020 has underscored the uncertainty and unpredictability of such catastrophes. The regularity of such incidents calls for the immediate application of resilience thinking.