It’s here, Delhi’s famous smog is back. So don’t be surprised if you can longer see anything in the mornings. On Tuesday, the concentration of particulate matter shot up twice the safe limit. The air quality index on Tuesday evening showed 324, deeming the air in Delhi unhealthy and ‘very poor.’
It’s that time of the year again, when it becomes difficult to breathe in the city, due to the smog that surrounds it. Save your lungs fellow Delhiites. Because in 2018, Delhi’s air quality index went up to 345 after Diwali, a number we already seem to approaching this year, way before the firework bonanza.
As someone who relocated to Delhi from Chennai, a city where the air quality stands at 100 at its worst. Delhi took a huge toll on my lungs, and the lungs of 2.2 million children in the city who now have irreversible lung damage. Air pollution kills a child every 3 minutes in India, an analysis by the Global Burden of Disease, 2017 stated.
Synonymous with winters in the city, the pollution brings with it heart diseases and lung problems, making it extremely difficult to breathe. On one hand, the Delhi Government has been forced into monitoring data from the NASA satellite imagery to keep an eye on the stubble burning. And on the other, the odd and even system for cars is being enforced once again. But with Diwali just round the corner, we can’t be sure of the difference it will make.
Most of us struggle with dust allergies and the fact that we’re deliberately reducing our life span by living in this city, 10 years per resident to be exact. That is a devastating number!
Every year, Delhi sees a high rise in pollution due to different factors such as meteorological conditions, combined with the rise in local emissions and the crop burning in neighbouring states like Punjab and Haryana.
I know I’m not the only one who struggles to breathe in this city, my lungs are getting heavy and I get tired way too easily, this has forced me into protecting myself. Hopefully this time round, it doesn’t get worse than last year and Delhi doesn’t turn into a gas chamber.