Understanding Responses of Atmospheric Pollution and its Variability to Contradicting Nexus of Urbanization–Industrial Emission Control in Haldia, an Industrial City of West Bengal

Poor atmospheric health has been causing millions of deaths globally by attacking the respiratory system. According to the World Health Organization, India has the most heavily polluted cities overall and contributes significantly to the annual particle concentration at a global level. This situation demands intensive and extensive monitoring systems for strategy optimization at various levels of governance to combat health and environmental. These strategies include an efficient air quality control strategy, the management of pollution sources while taking into account both local and national controls, etc. However, inadequacy in monitoring stations, which are primarily targeted at cities, has kept most of the small towns and villages out of the radar. This poses difficulty in assessing pollution levels at the local and regional scales, thereby causing a poor understanding of the intensity and spatio-temporal variability of pollutant concentration. Addressing this issue, an attempt has been made in this study to understand the atmospheric pollution of an industry-based city, Haldia in West Bengal, where all the monitoring stations are situated in industrial centers and function nearby making a larger part unmonitored. Handheld instruments were used to collect field data for five other stations selected mainly from non-industrial areas experiencing rapid detrimental land use conversion. Despite being spatially consistent in higher (2015–2019 mean of 95) and lower Air Quality Index (2015–2019 mean of 65), respectively, in industrial and non-industrial areas, contradicting temporal trend is quite distinct in them. Pollution has increased in areas experiencing rapid LULC change, especially in rapidly urbanized areas, whereas industrial emission controls and implementation of various pollution control strategies, including implementation of pollution base profiling and baseline policy action, graded response action plan, etc., have been successful in abating pollution in areas near industries. The study pinpoints the requirement of spatially consistent awareness in rapidly urbanized sections of Haldia to avoid possible environmental hazards caused by urbanization and the necessity of having a dense network of monitoring stations to capture local variations in pollutant concentrations for a better understanding of atmospheric health.