Craving a cigarette or seven? Breathe Delhi’s air
free, shows that inhaling the air in Delhi is equivalent to smoking 7.7 cigarettes a day.
The figure for Lucknow is 8, for Jaipur 7.3, for Bengaluru 0.7, for Chandigarh 6.1, for Ranchi 3.3, for Indore 3.9 and for Kolkata 3.5. Figures for other major Indian cities range between 2 and 7 cigarettes a day.
“PM2.5 particles are small enough to work their way deep into the lungs and into the bloodstream, where they can trigger heart attack, stroke, lung cancer and asthma. Here is the rule of thumb: one cigarette per day is the rough equivalent of a PM2.5 level of 22μg/m3. Of course, unlike cigarette smoking, the pollution reaches every age group,” the study coauthored by Richard Mueller, physics professor, University of California, Berkeley, reads.
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(WHO), earlier this month, declared Delhi as the most polluted mega city in the world and Mumbai as the fourth-most polluted. It also found that 14 Indian cities were among the world’s 20 most polluted.
Based on studies across China, the study finds that Beijing has on average a PM2.5 level of 85μg/m3, equivalent to smoking four cigarettes.
“The air pollution in New Delhi, India, in winter 2017 was 547μg/m3 (for PM2.5), equivalent to about 25 cigarettes each day.” The app developers use real-time air pollution data from World Air Quality Index project (aqicn.org) as the main data source, geo-locate one’s phone through global positioning system (GPS), and connect it to the database, which shows the number of cigarettes smoked that day.
The app developers said people were only vaguely aware about the extent of air pollution in mega cities.
“Air-quality monitoring stations only provide numbers that are very specific to professionals who work on environmental issues. So when you make this conversion to cigarettes, it makes it easier for people to understand what they are dealing with, and the consequences air quality has in their daily lives,” said Parisborn app developer Amaury Martiny who developed the app with designer Marcelo Coelho from Brazil.
He added that when users open the app, they will learn how detrimental their local air is to their health, in a quantitative yet graspable way.
“By checking the app regularly, similar to a weather app, citizens will know to take simple measures on bad air quality days, such as staying indoors or wearing a mask,” said Martiny. “Particulate pollution will only get worse in countries like India, if measures are not taken to curb it. Developing countries continue to emit a large number of pollutants from coal-burning plants or transportation vehicles, amid construction projects and other investments related to fast-paced industrialisation.”
However, officials from the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) said it was incorrect to compare cigarette smoking and the effects of air pollution.