BackOla, Microsoft partner to measure real time street-level air quality in Delhi
The project is set to begin later this month and is expected to collect data points over the course of one year to complete the spectrum of variation in Delhi's air-pollutionThe data along with traffic and speed data can provide information on bad air-quality hotspots in the city
PremiumNew Delhi: To support the government's efforts to combat the challenge of air pollution, ride hailing start-up Ola and Microsoft Research on Monday announced a partnership to measure street-level air quality data in the Delhi-National Capital Region.
Ola Mobility Institute (Ola’s policy think tank) and Microsoft Research will jointly conduct research to provide periodic reports and insights from the data collected.
The project is set to begin later this month and is expected to collect data points over the course of one year to complete the spectrum of variation in Delhi’s air-pollution. Particulate Matter or PM 2.5 data would be collected through sensors mounted on Ola’s fleet for which cars have been identified based on complex algorithms to ensure maximum geographical coverage of data. The sensors, to be mounted in the engine compartment, have been custom made by Delhi-based Purelogic Labs India Pvt. Ltd.
The street-level data will complement the current efforts of the government and environmentalists and help in their larger air pollution control plans for Delhi-NCR. The data collected would be made public in the form of dashboards, reports and also raw data would be provided in open data formats for the benefit of researchers and policy makers in this area.
Venkat Padmanabhan, deputy managing director, Microsoft Research India, said: “We are excited to be partnering with Ola on the critical challenge of air pollution, leveraging their reach in the country and our expertise in cutting-edge technologies such as IoT-based sensing and AI, to perform a rigorous research study, with the goal of enabling informed solutions."
According to Ola’s research, most air-quality sensors measure ambient air-quality which is not reflective of the street-level pollution people are subjected to on a daily basis. “This project is part of Ola City Sense, a programme to provide intelligent data based insights to cities. We are confident that the data acquired from this study will add a new dimension of knowledge to what is already known about air pollution and help combat the problem better through hyper local strategies," said Anand Shah, Head, Ola Mobility Institute.
This data along with traffic and speed data can provide information on bad air-quality hot spots in the city and has the potential to be replicated across other cities to support the implementation of National Clean Air Programme, Shah added.
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