NEW DELHI: Hundreds of Delhi residents staged a rally on Tuesday, demanding immediate government action to address the worsening air quality in the Indian capital region, where pollution levels have reached extreme and hazardous levels.
Pollution in Delhi and the surrounding metropolitan area — home to about 30 million people — has been in the “very poor” category for weeks, with some areas reaching the “severe” category on Tuesday with an Air Quality Index score of at least 402, according to data from the Central Pollution Control Board.
On the AQI scale from 0 to 500, good air quality is represented by levels below 50, while levels above 300 are dangerous.
“The current situation in Delhi is very dangerous … The pollution is constantly increasing and our government is doing nothing to prevent this,” Aditya Anand, a protest organizer from the Scientists for Society student organization, told Arab News.
Delhi was ranked as the most polluted city in the world on Tuesday afternoon by Swiss group IQAir, with a concentration of PM 2.5 that was 49.4 times higher than the World Health Organization’s recommended levels.
Air quality in Delhi and its suburbs is relatively poor throughout the year due to toxic pollutants from tens of millions of cars, construction sites, factory emissions and waste burning. But the problem gets worse in the winters, aggravated by farmland fires in the country’s northwest and southeast, where farmers clear stubble to prepare fields to plant wheat.
Since Nov. 11, the Delhi capital region has been under the third level of the government’s Graded Response Action Plan, which bans all non-essential construction activities and the plying of diesel vehicles in Delhi.
But protesters said that current measures to address the city’s pollution problem were still inadequate, and called for more government action as they gathered at the Jantar Mantar site in the center of New Delhi, with banners reading: “Help us breathe,” “If air is free why is breathing a privilege?” and “Undo the smog.”
“We have to organize on this because it is a failure of the system which is responsible for this hazardous pollution. We have to understand that this deadly pollution is occurring because they are not making any kind of restrictions on the industries, on the transportation system,” Anand said.
Monday’s rally was the second protest this month on the air pollution issue in Delhi, where poor air quality was responsible for one in seven deaths in 2023, amounting to more than 17,000 lives, according to the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air.
“It is impossible for people who have terminal illness, lung infection, respiratory problems, for young people, elderly people, to step outside of their houses safe in the knowledge that nothing will happen to them,” Neha, a PhD student at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, told Arab News.
“I am affected. All of us young people who are supposedly in the prime of our health, we are affected by it, so this is a concern for all of us,” she said. “When we ask the government what it has done to ensure clean air, the government has nothing but excuses and fudged-up data.”
Activists have become increasingly concerned over information manipulation by the government, who they say is trying to cover up the real air-quality data.
“We don’t even know how polluted the air is, data has been manipulated with this year, very, very brazenly. Last three to four weeks we’ve seen the government really turning off the air-quality monitors, sprinkling water around the air-quality monitors,” Delhi-based environmentalist Vimlendu Jha told Arab News.
He sees air pollution as Delhi’s biggest public health emergency yet.
“This is the largest public health emergency that Delhi is facing. This is no more an issue of the environment, it is an issue of public health,” he said. “The government is supposed to be a custodian … Where’s the air-quality governance in our country?
