You Can Now Tweet To Check Air Pollution Levels In India
Twitter, the popular micro-blogging website, on Friday announced that now its users in India can get real-time data on air pollution in several Indian cities with just a tweet. The company made the announcement on the occassion of Earth Day with the hashtag #Breathe.
“Pollution is rising at an alarming rate and people frequently get into discussions about the air quality in India,” Twitter wrote on its blog. “People do not have a quick, easy way to get live updates of the air quality in their neighbourhood.”
To get the air pollution details, all you have to do is just use the hashtag #Breathe with your location and tweet on Twitter. You will automatically see a reply tweet with a real-time update about the air quality you enquired for. This feature is currently available in Delhi, Bengaluru and Mumbai, but Twitter is planning to bring it to other cities too.
https://twitter.com/TwitterIndia/status/723395404142809088
To make this possible, Twitter says that it partnered up with India Spend, which is well known for monitoring air quality in different regions. India Spend uses low-quality cost sensors fitted with GPR transmitters to monitor the air quality across India.
https://twitter.com/TwitterIndia/status/723124081495674881
India is currently one of those countries with high number of air pollution. And unfortunately it is increasing year by year. While our government is doing its best to decrease the pollution level, but it is us who should think about that more. As the government can’t alone make the change, until we join hands to help them.
Twitter is planning to bring more cities in its #Breathe feature list - namely Patna, Ahmedabad, Raipur, Lucknow, Varanasi, Chandigarh, Ranchi, Agra and Jaipur. But we currently don’t have any exact roll out date for that.
Photo by Sanjeev Verma/Hindustan Times / Getty Images