Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Monday inaugurated India's first smog tower in Delhi's Connaught Place that will purify 1,000 cubic metres of air per second within a radius of around 1km.
He said the tower has been set up as a pilot project, and initial trends will be available within a month. If the pilot project is successful, more smog towers will be installed in the national capital.
Earlier, officials had said that a two-year pilot study will be undertaken to ascertain the effectiveness of the smog tower after it becomes operational.
A control room has been set up at the site to monitor the operations of the smog tower.
Another 25-metre-tall smog tower, built by the Central government at Anand Vihar, is expected to become operational by August 31, officials of the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) said.
Tata Projects Limited (TPL) is building the two smog towers with technical support from IIT Bombay, which, in collaboration with IIT Delhi, will validate their performance.
The NBCC India Ltd. has been appointed as project management consultant.
The CPCB is the nodal agency for the tower at Anand Vihar, while the Delhi Pollution Control Committee is the nodal agency for the one coming up at Connaught Place.
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The two towers will have 1,200 air filters each developed by experts at the University of Minnesota in the US—which also helped design a 100m-high smog tower in Xian, China.
The smog towers, being built at a cost of Rs 22 crore each, are estimated to reduce concentration of PM2.5 up to 70 per cent in a 1-km radius around them.
