Taking a hyper-local approach to study rising levels of air pollution, the students hope to identify areas in the city that need to be monitored for air quality and eventually zero in on triggers in the worst-affected localities.

Focussing on such areas first is key to reducing overall pollution levels in the city, they believe.

For a start, the students have chosen four locations: Manali (industrial site), T Nagar (commercial site), Perungudi (dump site), and the IITM campus as a background site with forest cover. Their findings have so far shown a significantly high level of particulate matter in the industrial and commercial sites.

Chennai is among the 72 cities that have non-attainment areas -locations where pollution levels are higher than the ambient air quality standards. The long term goal of the research is to identify these non attainment areas and the pollution triggers that persist in such locations.

"The whole of Chennai city cannot be a non-attainment area. Looking at the city level will not yield any in-depth finding as fixed monitoring stations are restricted to a particular region. We need location specific data to identify where the focus should be. Tackling pollutant levels in such non-attainment areas will automatically bring down the overall pollution levels,"says Prof Shiva Nagendra from the Department of Civil Engineering, IITMadras.

Jyothi S Menon, a third year student of civil engineering, uses an optical spectrometer coupled with a GPS system to study the concentration of particulate matter.

Jyothi, who began her research a few months ago, measured particulate matter in the winter months and hopes to capture data for the other seasons to get an idea over the fluctuating levels during the year.

"The PM concentration levels are very different depending on the local activity. Areas that have a lot of commercial activity all around showed high levels of pollution that could impact health,"she said.

A commercial locality like T Nagar showed that PM concentration is very high in the peak evening hours, while a dump site like Perungudi showed that the dust and particulate matter suspension levels were very high through the day due to activities like sifting, truck movement and diesel exhaust.

The institute's research findings will later be shared with the stakeholders concerned so that action plans can be developed.

"We also hope to get in touch with hospitals to understand the impact of these findings on human health,"said Menon.

Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research -UFZ, Germany is partnering IIT-M in the study.

"Germany has identified locations that have high pollution levels as low emission zones to ensure citizens do not do anything that could lead to increase in pollution levels in those areas. We want to learn from those models and identify such air quality control zones through this study,"said Prof Nagendra.