Meet Manoj Jena, Man behind Chandigarh Smog Tower: Local Superheroes #1

4 min readMay 13, 2022

If you happen to be living or traveling in Chandigarh around Sector 26, you must have noticed a tower contraption, as it is really hard to ignore such a thing. A couple of weeks ago I came across it and realized it was an air purifier and I’m certain just like me you must have had a lot of questions about it.

Upon researching these I came to know that these were installed by the Pious-Air Team with a noble motive of keeping air quality good around the city, other than that not much information was available about its team and history. While I looked at various news articles and other blogs, all had different information and there was no clear indication on how these were planned and made. After several days of reaching out to the directors and engineers, Manoj Jena. Finally, I arranged a digital Q&A with Manoj Jena, where he responded to my queries thoroughly. Along with that he told me how Chandigarh became the first city in the country to be equipped with the tallest and filter less air purifying tower.

During the conversation I had with Manoj, he described his life journey on how he came up with this idea and the struggles he faced during the installation of this device.

Words from Manoj

Q-1 How was the entire journey and did you face any struggles during that?

A- I graduated from Nagpur University as a Civil Engineer and worked as one in a job till 2010. During that time when I used to commute to and from my office, I used to face excessive heat and extreme amounts of pollution on the road and those times I used to often wonder “what if traffic signals were equipped with giant coolers?” but of course, that was just a thought.

Following 2010, I started my own business of piping, and this thought didn’t come across me again for years. One day in 2017, I was sitting with my friend, and we were redescending about the old job and that is when I thought once again to myself, let’s do something to reduce the pollution.

From that point onwards, I started taking some time out of my routine to ponder for a solution. After all the efforts and devotion, I finally started the device and it functioned, however, I needed them to get it tested to be certain that it works for the intended purpose. Then I contacted a private lab in Mohali, Punjab and sent them a miniature version of the purifier for testing and results were good and up to the mark.

Afterwards I started contacting all the possible government and private organizations to get approval, I even contacted the Prime Minister’s Office. The real struggle actually started here. As I had sunk countless hours and efforts into this project but none of the authorities were interested in it and it felt like it all had come to nothing. Finally, I received a call from CPCC and they asked me to demonstrate and explain about my invention.

Q-2 How did you finally succeed?

A- Initially, the Chandigarh Pollution Control Committee or the CPCC also doubted me and wondered whether I had something worthwhile to present or if I was just wasting their time. However, I asked them to test the machine themselves and for it to be tested again I had to recreate it once again, which I inevitably did by investing a lot of money and time into it once again. After three days of hard and thorough testing, we were on the same note.

It was there and then when I got the recognition and we moved forward in the right direction and Chandigarh got the country’s first ever tallest and filter less Air Purification Tower.

Q-3 What about the budget? The cost on the internet says Rs 1.5 crores, is it true?

A- Well, it was the original budget and it would’ve been that way, but it is not the case, as this was the estimated cost in 2019 but once we started to actually build the machine in a post-covid time, prices of all the materials had soared significantly, up to 3 times the standard price. Now at the end of the project the total cost came up to Rs 5 crores which is more than 3 times the estimated cost.

Q- 4 I read in an article about your project, there was a mention of a smoke tower in Delhi. So I’m assuming that was inspired by your idea as well. Any comments on this?

A- See, the Delhi project was nowhere in my mind and it didn’t even exist prior to 2019 and no one had heard about it until 2017. Furthermore, our project and concept is totally different from Delhi’s smoke tower and it is not in our competition.

As you can see from this conversation, we can see there are people in the world that truly work for mankind, and definitely need more people like Manoj. This invention has inspired many, and people from the neighboring areas are also demanding for such devices to be installed in their region. These really are true superheroes of today, and if you wish to learn more, just visit their website, and refer to the links given by them below.

Meet Manoj Jena, Man behind Chandigarh Smog Tower: Local Superheroes #1

Words from Manoj

Written by Pankaj kukreti

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