MPSC 2024 Prelims Paper-I · Question 33 of 100

Correct — option (1), Delhi, Pune, Ahmedabad, Mumbai. SAFAR stands for the System of Air Quality and Weather Forecasting And Research, and it is a national initiative of the Ministry of Earth Sciences, developed indigenously by the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology at Pune with the India Meteorological Department as its operational partner. Its purpose is not merely to measure air quality but to forecast it: the system runs a network of monitoring stations across a city, feeds their readings together with emission inventories and meteorological data into a numerical model, and issues a location-specific air quality index with a forecast for the coming days, colour-coded so that a citizen or a city administration can act on it in advance rather than after the fact. It has been established in four cities, and the four are Delhi, Mumbai, Pune and Ahmedabad. The reason all three wrong options look plausible is that they replace one or two of these with another large metropolitan city — Chennai, Kolkata, Hyderabad or Bengaluru — on the reasonable but incorrect assumption that a scheme of this kind must simply cover the four biggest cities in the country. It does not. Delhi and Mumbai are on the list for the obvious reason that they are the country's largest urban agglomerations with severe air quality problems; Pune is on it in large part because the institute that built the system, IITM, is located there, which made the city the natural place to develop and validate the model; and Ahmedabad is the fourth. Holding the list as 'the two obvious metros plus the developer's own city plus Ahmedabad' is a more reliable way to remember it than trying to recall four names in isolation.

• (2)Delhi, Chennai, Mumbai, Kolkata — This is the four-biggest-metros answer, and it is exactly the guess the question is designed to catch. It keeps Delhi and Mumbai, which are on the real list, and substitutes Chennai and Kolkata for Pune and Ahmedabad. Neither Chennai nor Kolkata is among the four cities where SAFAR was established. The underlying error is treating city size as the selection criterion for a research and forecasting system, when the actual list reflects where the developing institute is based and where the initial deployments were made.
• (3)Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai — This option also keeps the two correct metros and replaces Pune and Ahmedabad with Hyderabad and Chennai, neither of which is one of SAFAR's four cities. Hyderabad is a common substitution in questions about national scientific and monitoring networks because it hosts several central institutions, and its presence here is meant to look institutionally plausible. But SAFAR's association is with the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology at Pune, and Pune's absence from this option is the decisive omission.
• (4)Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai — This substitutes Bengaluru and Chennai for Pune and Ahmedabad. Bengaluru is a natural-looking inclusion in any list of Indian cities associated with science and technology, which is what makes it an effective distractor, but it is not one of the four cities where SAFAR was established. As with the other wrong options, the giveaway is that Pune is missing: a candidate who remembers that the system was built by IITM Pune can eliminate every option that leaves Pune out, which disposes of all three wrong choices at once.

Air quality management needs three distinct capabilities, and SAFAR was built to supply all of them in the cities where it operates. The first is measurement — a network of automatic monitoring stations recording the concentration of pollutants such as particulate matter of 10 and 2.5 micrometre size, nitrogen dioxide, sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide and ozone. The second is communication — converting many pollutant readings into a single number a non-specialist can act on, which is the function of the air quality index. India's National Air Quality Index, launched in 2015, does this on a six-category scale running from Good through Satisfactory, Moderately Polluted, Poor and Very Poor to Severe, computed from eight pollutants. The third and hardest is forecasting — predicting what the air will be like tomorrow and the day after, which requires an emission inventory for the city, a weather model, and a chemical transport model that moves and transforms pollutants in the simulated atmosphere. It is this forecasting capability that distinguishes SAFAR from ordinary monitoring, because a forecast lets a city act before the pollution arrives: restrict construction, adjust traffic, or issue a health advisory to vulnerable groups.

Environment questions in MPSC papers regularly ask which institution runs a named scheme, where it operates, and which ministry it sits under, because those are checkable single facts. SAFAR is a favourite because it combines all three: an acronym to expand, a parent ministry, a developing institute and a fixed list of cities. The habit to build is to attach every environmental initiative to its ministry and its implementing body, since that association usually explains the geography as well — knowing that IITM Pune built SAFAR immediately explains why Pune is one of the four cities and immediately eliminates any option without it. It is also worth keeping the related national instruments distinct: the National Air Quality Index for reporting, the National Clean Air Programme for city-level abatement targets, and the Central and State Pollution Control Boards for regulation.

• SAFAR stands for the System of Air Quality and Weather Forecasting And Research, an initiative of the Ministry of Earth Sciences.
• It was developed indigenously by the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune, with the India Meteorological Department as its operational partner.
• SAFAR has been established in four cities: Delhi, Mumbai, Pune and Ahmedabad.
• The system issues location-specific, colour-coded air quality index values together with forecasts for coming days, rather than only recording current pollutant levels.
• India's National Air Quality Index, launched in 2015, reports on a six-category scale from Good to Severe and is computed from eight pollutants including particulate matter of 10 and 2.5 micrometre size, nitrogen dioxide, sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide, ozone, ammonia and lead.

• Assuming a national scheme must cover the four largest metropolitan cities; SAFAR's four are Delhi, Mumbai, Pune and Ahmedabad, and Chennai, Kolkata, Hyderabad and Bengaluru are not among them
• Confusing SAFAR, a forecasting system under the Ministry of Earth Sciences, with the regulatory monitoring run by the Central and State Pollution Control Boards
• Attributing SAFAR to the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change; it belongs to the Ministry of Earth Sciences, which is why the meteorological institutes are involved
• Treating the air quality index as a measurement rather than a computed composite; it is derived from several pollutants, each with its own sub-index

MPSC asks environmental institutions and schemes as single-fact recall — expand the acronym, name the ministry, name the implementing institute, or name the cities or states covered. The wrong options are built by swapping one or two items in a list for equally plausible ones, so partial recall does not survive. For schemes with a fixed geography, the most reliable anchor is the implementing institution's own location, because central agencies routinely deploy first where they are based, and that logic also gives the candidate a reason to remember rather than a list to memorise.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  SAFAR, the System of Air Quality and Weather Forecasting And Research, was developed indigenously by which institution ?

  • (a)The Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune
  • (b)The Central Pollution Control Board, New Delhi
  • (c)The National Environmental Engineering Research Institute, Nagpur
  • (d)The Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru

  Answer(a) The Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune — an institute under the Ministry of Earth Sciences, which built SAFAR with the India Meteorological Department as operational partner. The Central Pollution Control Board is the regulatory monitoring body, and NEERI at Nagpur is a CSIR environmental engineering laboratory; neither developed SAFAR.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  India's National Air Quality Index, launched in 2015, classifies air quality into how many categories ?

  • (a)Four
  • (b)Five
  • (c)Six
  • (d)Eight

  Answer(c) Six — Good, Satisfactory, Moderately Polluted, Poor, Very Poor and Severe. The index is computed from eight pollutants, which is the number candidates most often confuse with the number of categories: particulate matter of 10 and 2.5 micrometre size, nitrogen dioxide, sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide, ozone, ammonia and lead.