NEW CERTIFICATION SCHEME
The Ministry of Environment, Forest and
Climate Change (MoEFCC) recently designated the Council of Scientific and
Industrial Research-National Physical Laboratory (CSIR-NPL) as a national
agency that shall be responsible for carrying out certification for instruments
and equipments for monitoring emissions and ambient air.
The aim is to have a check on
the quality of instruments and data. The development comes in the backdrop of
the National Clean Air Programme (NCAP), released in January 2019 by the
environment ministry.
This is a positive move and
will bring uniformity in the instruments that are currently being used for
regulatory grade monitoring through enhanced scrutiny on instrument design and
performance, and that will address issues related to data quality.
WHY THE CERTIFICATION?
Most of the instrument used for
Continuous Ambient Air Quality Monitoring Stations (CAQMS) and Continuous
Emission Monitoring Systems (CEMS) are imported and come with their respective
certifications that have been issued by agencies such as the EPA, Technischer
Überwachungsverein (TUV), Monitoring Certification Scheme (MCERTS); based on
the environmental conditions of the country issuing the certificate.
Their certification is not
based on the climatic and environmental conditions that are prevalent across
India. Designating CSIR-NPL as a verification agency will help in performance
optimisation of equipments for the Indian environmental and meteorological
conditions.
According to the NCAP report,
one of its main objectives is “to augment and evolve effective and proficient
ambient air quality monitoring network across the country for ensuring a
comprehensive and reliable database.
COMPONENTS: As
per the NCAP, the proposed certification scheme will have three major
components —
NPL-India certification body
(NICB), certification committee and testing and calibration facility. The NICB
will be the highest body with five members, including the chairman, member
secretary, and the three expert members, one each from the CSIR-NPL, CPCB and
National Environmental Engineering & Research Institute (NEERI).
The second component, which is
the certification committee, will be consisting of seven members (four
permanent and three co-opted). The three co-opted members must be associated
with independent institutes or organisations like the Indian Institute of Technology
(IIT), National Accreditation Board for Testing and Calibration Laboratories
(NABL), or other academic institutes as per the required technical/academic
expertise on case to case basis.
The third component, which will be the heart of this scheme, will provide the required test reports. The facility will be fully capable for testing and calibrating extractive,
in-stack, or cross-stack measurements to allow more than one system to be
tested at a time as per the test programme generated by the certification
committee. The proposed facility will allow testing of OCEMS, CAAQMS and
data-handling systems (DAHS), besides other air pollution monitoring equipment
such as PM2.5 and PM10 samplers.
MERITS OF HAVING A CERTIFICATION PROCESS
Improved enforcement of emission
monitoring across industries.
Better data quality.
