Analyzing the impact of brick kiln emissions on air quality using open source GIS
Student name: Mr Saarthak Bhola
Guide: Dr Prateek Sharma
Year of completion: 2016
Host Organisation: The Energy and Resource Institute (TERI), New Delhi
Supervisor (Host Organisation): Mr Sachin Kumar
Abstract: India is the second largest producer of bricks in Asia and Varanasi is among the largest brick manufacturing cluster of India. Varanasi is one of the fastest developing cities of India with the growing population of 1.1 million. The district of Varanasi is experiencing multi-dimensional difficulties such as over urbanization and various kind of increasing pollutions. As the demand for construction material is growing, the demand for bricks are increasing, which is leading to the growth in the number of establishments of brick kilns in that region. As the number of brick kilns are increasing, it is distressing the air quality of that region due to its emission which contain harmful gases for both humans and environment. This study tries to establish the schematics of GIS approaches to understand the contribution of brick kilns in deteriorating the air quality and the variation of particulate matter for the time when the brick kilns were operational and not operational for which, open source GIS and R programming language is used to examine the results.
Keywords: Brick kilns, Urbanization, R programming, Open source GIS, Particulate matter.
