Date published: 15/11/2024 – 11:34

2 minutes

Home to more than 30 million people, Delhi and the surrounding metropolitan area consistently top the world rankings for air pollution during the winter months.

Smog is blamed for thousands of premature deaths each year and is an annual source of misery for residents; various piecemeal government initiatives fail to solve the problem in any measurable way.

All primary schools were closed by government order on Thursday night; Younger students, who are particularly vulnerable to smoke-related illnesses due to their age, have switched to online classes instead.

“I have an eight-year-old child and he has been complaining of cough for the last few days,” Satraj, a Delhi resident who did not give his surname, told AFP on the streets of the capital. he said.

“The government did the right thing by closing schools.”

Thursday’s edict also banned construction work, ordered drivers of older diesel-powered vehicles to stay off the streets and ordered water trucks to spray roads to clear dust particles from the air.

Delhi’s air quality dropped to “hazardous” levels for the fourth consecutive day this week, according to monitoring firm IQAir.

Levels of PM2.5 pollutants (dangerous, cancer-causing microparticles that enter the bloodstream through the lungs) were recorded at more than 26 times the World Health Organization’s recommended daily maximum shortly after dawn on Friday.

thousands of fires

Critics repeatedly say authorities are failing in their duty to combat a crisis that ravages the city every year.

“We did not respond to the emergency with the intensity with which we are facing this crisis,” Sunil Dahiya of New Delhi-based advocacy group Envirocatalysts told AFP.

The acrid smoke that forms in New Delhi every year is caused by farmers in nearby states burning stubble to clear their fields for plowing.

More than 7,000 individual farm fires were recorded in Punjab province north of the capital, a report published by broadcaster NDTV on Friday said.

Emissions from industry and the numerous coal-fired power plants surrounding the city also play a role, as do vehicle exhaust and the burning of household waste.

“Even reduced emissions will be high because we haven’t yet made long-term systemic changes like how we commute, generate energy, or manage our waste,” Dahiya said.

Colder temperatures and slow-moving winds make matters worse by trapping deadly pollutants each winter.

A study in the medical journal The Lancet announced that 1.67 million premature deaths in the world’s most populous country in 2019 were attributed to air pollution.

© 2024 AFP