Bhupender Yadav Meets Start-ups on Delhi-NCR Air Pollution

Union Minister for Environment, Forest and Climate Change, Shri Bhupender Yadav, sat down on 17 October 2026 with start-ups and innovation companies that work on cutting air pollution, the aim being solutions for Delhi-NCR that are affordable, can be scaled and rest on technology. The meeting was one of a run of stakeholder engagements held under the campaign theme Saaf Hawa mein Hissedaari, Hum Sabhi ki hai Zimmedaari. Union Minister of State Shri Kirti Vardhan Singh and Delhi's Minister for Environment, Forest and Wildlife, Sardar Manjinder Singh Sirsa, were present, along with senior officers of MoEFCC, MoHUA, MoAFW, the Delhi government, CAQM, CPCB and DPCC.

Nine problem statements put to the innovators

The Minister laid out a set of problem statements spanning 9 key areas of air pollution management and asked the innovators how their technologies could be adapted, scaled and put on the ground. He placed the exercise beside measures already running — the Graded Response Action Plan, the push for cleaner fuels and electric mobility, and a denser air-quality monitoring network — saying technology at the level of the source would add to them.

What the start-ups brought

The offerings ran across the whole chain, from detection and monitoring through prediction to enforcement and mitigation. Among them were tamper-proof systems for Online Continuous Emission Monitoring Systems (OCEMS), air pollution control devices and Pollution Under Control (PUC) testing; artificial intelligence to spot industrial emission violations; real-time watch on combustion efficiency and on diesel generator emission-control devices; and ways of catching and holding down dust at construction and demolition sites. Low-cost mechanised road sweeping, monitoring of road-dust resuspension, portable pothole repair and modular dust-containment systems were also demonstrated. Briefing the media, the Minister said the thrust was on artificial intelligence, sensors, remote sensing, satellite and drone-based technologies and data analytics, so that pollution is understood in real time. Firms showed hyperlocal air-quality monitoring, city-wide pollution mapping, hotspot identification and forecasting, source apportionment by machine learning, round-the-clock detection of stubble and open biomass burning, and automatic flagging of vehicles without a valid PUC certificate or past their permitted age.

What the Minister asked for

Shri Yadav said joining OCEMS readings to plant-operation data is essential if malpractice is to be caught, and that artificial intelligence has a part to play there. He called for tamper-proof PUC monitoring, smoother traffic and prediction of congestion hotspots, and for guidelines on parali storage drawn up with MoAFW, CAQM and CPCB, together with a model for storing crop residue in the field itself. Start-ups were urged to work on scientific handling of crop residue, solid waste and construction and demolition waste, including paddy straw routed to bioenergy, biomass fuel, composting and eco-friendly packaging, and biochar. The engagement, held in Jan Bhagidari mode, is meant to close the distance between policymakers and technology innovators.