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| Kathmandu, Wednesday December 31, 2003 Paush 16, 2060. |
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Capital has dirtiest air? WB denies saying
so
BY KIRAN CHAPAGAIN
KATHMANDU, Dec 30 - The World Bank Nepal Office today refuted
a recent news report putting Kathmandu on the top of the 17 Asian cities with the dirtiest
air, saying that the World Bank did not come up with any report like that, and that the
fact was "misrepresented" by the press.
A senior World Bank official here today said that the
Associated Press (AP) report datelined December 18 and filed from Manila, the Philippines,
which was carried by several international media, "misrepresented" what was said
and presented at a workshop on Better Air Quality.
"The press picked up the pollution data presented at the
workshop out of context and made its own judgement," Asif Faiz, World Bank’s
Acting Country Representative to Nepal, told The Kathmandu Post."The AP report
misrepresented what the presenters at the conference, including what Christopher Hoban,
Acting Country Director of the World Bank in the Philippines, said during the
conference," he said.
Faiz further said that the organiser of the workshop, the
Clean Air Initiative for Asian Cities (CAI-Asia), an Asian Development Bank-supported
project has informed the Bank that it will soon write to concerned media organizations for
correction of the misinterpreted news report.
Aside from the American news agency, AP, the Asian Wall
Street Journal also ran the report, which created a furore in Nepal. Kathmandu’s
Mayor Keshav Sthapit last week sought explanations and publicly announced that he would
sue the Bank.The Bank has also refuted the media using it as the source of information for
the report saying, "The media reference to a World Bank report as the source of
information is not correct."
The pollution levels of PM (fine dust particles) of Asian
cities were presented in graphs at the said workshop to show that mega cities in
developing countries had their PM levels several times higher than the WHO guidelines,
which was not meant to make any comparison, Faiz clarified.
"The benchmarking report on Air Quality Management
CIA-Asia does not have the intention to rank cities according to pollution levels,"
reads an email sent to Faiz by Cornie Huizenga, an official with CAI-Asia at the ADB
headquarters in Manila. "We do not believe that it is desirable and feasible to do
so."
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