GLOBAL VIEW


Smog from space


Every year, the Diwali weekend leaves the Indian capital city of Delhi shrouded in dangerous smog


I


ndia celebrated the Festival of Lights – Diwali – this year on 19 October. But this year the festivities were a little different. After the Diwali weekend of 2016, Delhi was left choked and blanketed by smog to the point that the authorities called a high-level meeting to discuss steps to combat the capital’s dangerous pollution levels. This year, India’s apex court, the Supreme


Court stepped in and temporarily banned the sale of firecrackers in the region. The temporary ban was designed to test whether the move would cut the deadly pollution levels seen in Delhi, for three years in a row, during and after Diwali. While the World Health Organization (WHO)


suggests mean fine air particle levels of 25µg/m3 per day, the levels in Delhi generally tend to hit 640µg/m3


around late October/November. On 8


November 2017, the air quality reached epically bad proportions, and some monitoring stations reported an Air Quality Index of 999, way above the upper limit of ‘Hazardous’. Delhi veritably turned into a gas chamber. On 7 and 8 November 2017, moreover, the


Earth Observatory at NASA released images of northern India taken by satellites. One image showed a thick white blanket of smog covering much of north India, including Delhi. The smog that envelops the region is


exacerbated by the burning of biomass in the neighbouring states of Punjab and Haryana. Despite another ban, farmers in neighbouring Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh tend to burn crop residue at this time of the year, leading to toxic smoke that engulfs vast areas of north India. The airborne particles and toxic chemicals


that make up the smog continue to choke the 19m residents of the metropolitan area, while hospitals report a 20% surge in patients with pollution related illnesses. Air pollution has many causes. The area surrounding Delhi, the National


Capital Region, tends to generate 10,000 t/ day of municipal solid waste, much of which is eventually burned. This further exacerbates the problems by adding particulate pollution to the air.


Agricultural activities in the neighbouring


states also release greenhouse gas methane, whereas crop burning causes an increase in ash, soot and smoke.


Exhaust from factories and industries add


to the smog, while mining operations emit particulate matter and gases like methane, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide and oxides of nitrogen.


In addition, Delhi itself has more than 7.4m


vehicles on its roads, with an additional 1200 added each day. The current state government tried to implement an ambitious Odd-Even road-space rationing scheme to combat the menace, but to no avail. The result is a pollution ‘hotspot’.


Delhi has consistently been ranked as one of the most polluted cities in the world, with the 2016 WHO report ranking the capital as the 11th most polluted city out of 3000 cities in 103 countries in terms of fine particulate matter or PM2.5, and at the 25th place in terms of PM10 levels. According to the System of Air Quality


and Weather Forecasting and Research, respirable pollutants, PM2.5 and PM10, which are ultrafine particulates, were clocked at 283 and 517 micrograms/m3 60 and 100 micrograms/m3


. They should be at , respectively, and


anything higher could mean particulate matter embedding itself in the lungs, making its way to the bloodstream. Smog’s harmfulness stems from the potpourri of toxic substances it contains, including ozone, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide and fine airborne particulate matter. Many Chinese cities suffer high levels of pollution. However, the Chinese suffer pollution because of high levels of industrial output. Most pollutants there are industrial effluents. In Indian cities, it is not unregulated industrial activity that is the primary culprit, by and large. Badly maintained vehicles on badly planned and congested roads, irresponsible burning of trash by citizens and construction dust account for a large part of the problem. Delhi’s air quality deteriorates with unfailing


regularity around this time every year. The winds will eventually pick up and clear away the smog, but the situation cannot be solved by simply asking some factories to close down or taking cars off the road. Nor is closing schools and offices the answer. These might provide temporary relief.


What Delhi needs is a permanent solution.


Concerted and well-informed political action can help do that.


India


A. Nair is a business journalist based in Mumbai, India


The Earth Observatory at NASA recently released images of northern India taken by satellites. One showed a thick, white blanket of smog covering much of north India


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