Indian Institute of Technology Bombay — PAVITRA Pollution Modeling Tool

Organization:
Indian Institute of Technology Bombay
Award Date:
11/2022
Amount:
$647,618
Purpose:
To support work on modeling air pollution in South Asia.

Open Philanthropy recommended a grant of $647,618 over three years to the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay to support their work on modeling air pollution in South Asia.

IIT Bombay will be working to develop a modeling tool called PAVITRA (air Pollution mAnagement and interVentIon Tool foR IndiA) in collaboration with the University of California, Berkeley, the Center for Study of Science, Technology, and Policy (CSTEP), and the University of Washington. This is one of four grants we will be making to support this collaboration.

PAVITRA will pair an inventory of emissions in India with a modeling platform that converts changes in emissions to changes in pollution concentrations. This tool will make it much easier to understand the pollution and health impacts of interventions targeting a given source of emissions.

Open Philanthropy’s team sees a lack of cost-benefit analysis as a major gap in air quality management in India and the rest of South Asia. They anticipate that PAVITRA may be used by policymakers or researchers to improve their policy analyses and prioritize the most impactful policies, with a high impact on health outcomes in expectation.

This grant falls within Open Philanthropy’s focus area of South Asian air quality.

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