NEW DELHI: India's environmental watchdog has slapped New Delhi's government with a $3.5 million fine for failing to enforce rules to reduce smog in the world's most polluted major city, officials said Tuesday.
The National Green Tribunal penalised the capital administration for its lack of oversight after it emerged some polluting industries were still burning harmful waste in the open.
The tribunal, a national body tasked with ruling on environmental matters, had been hearing a plea from Delhi residents complaining about factories flouting laws on trash fires.
It said the Delhi government needed to instruct the court on how it would proceed with tackling the annual crisis that plagues the capital city of 20 million.
Each winter, Delhi chokes through haze so extreme that levels of airborne pollutants routinely eclipse safe limits by more than 30 times.
An estimated 1.1 million Indians die prematurely from air pollution every year.
The US embassy website in Delhi showed the level of harmful airborne particles hit 290 on Tuesday -- nearly 12 times World Health Organization's safe limits.
Delhi, which has shut down power plants and banned heavy trucks from the city in a bid to curb smog, has accused other states of not playing their part.
In particular, the capital has blamed governments in neighbouring Punjab and Haryana for crop fires that burn every year, sending smoke eastward.
Acrid smoke from these fires mingles with pollutants from cars, factories and construction sites in Delhi to create a lethal and persistent smog cocktail.
Delhi is not the first state to be slapped with a fine by the green watchdog, with West Bengal penalised roughly $700,000 for failure to clear its smoggy skies.
Delhi was among 14 Indian cities that figured in a list of the 20 most polluted cities across the globe this year issued by the WHO.
India pollution watchdog fines Delhi over toxic smog
India pollution watchdog fines Delhi over toxic smog
- Each winter, Delhi chokes through haze so extreme that levels of airborne pollutants routinely eclipse safe limits by more than 30 times
- An estimated 1.1 million Indians die prematurely from air pollution every year
French court slashes jails term for trio over 2020 teacher beheading
- Brahim Chnina, the Moroccan father of a girl who falsely claimed that Paty had asked Muslim students to leave his classroom before showing the caricatures, had his 13-year sentence reduced to 10 years
PARIS, France: A French court on Monday reduced on appeal the jail sentences of three men convicted over the 2020 terrorist beheading of a teacher who showed a class cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
Samuel Paty, 47, was murdered in October 2020 by an 18-year-old radical Islamist of Chechen origin in an act that horrified France.
His attacker, Abdoullakh Anzorov, was killed in a shootout with police.
Two friends of Anzorov, French national Naim Boudaoud and Azim Epsirkhanov, a Russian of Chechen origin, had their sentences of 16 years in prison reduced to six and seven years respectively by a Paris court of appeal.
Both were accused of having driven Anzorov and helping him to procure weapons before the beheading.
Brahim Chnina, the Moroccan father of a girl who falsely claimed that Paty had asked Muslim students to leave his classroom before showing the caricatures, had his 13-year sentence reduced to 10 years.
His daughter, then aged 13, was not actually in the classroom at the time and during the first trial apologized to the teacher’s family.
The court however left the 15-year term for French-Moroccan Islamist activist Abdelhakim Sefrioui untouched.
The quartet were among the seven men and one woman found guilty in 2024 of contributing to the climate of hatred that led to the beheading of the history and geography teacher in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, west of Paris.
Paty, who has become a free-speech icon, used the cartoons as part of an ethics class to discuss freedom of expression laws in France.
