New Delhi a ‘gas chamber’
As thick smog crept over India’s capital this week, which its mayor likened to a “gas chamber,” Nikunj Pandey could feel his eyes and throat burning.
NEW DELHI— As thick smog crept over India’s capital this week, which its mayor likened to a “gas chamber,” Nikunj Pandey could feel his eyes and throat burning.
Pandey stopped doing his regular workouts and said he felt tightness in the lungs. He started wearing a triple layer of pollution masks over his mouth. And he became angry that he couldn’t safely breathe the air.
“This is a basic right,” he said. “A basic right of humanity.”
Pandey is among hundreds of thousands in New Delhi who have become more aware of the toxic air in recent years and were increasingly frustrated at the lack of meaningful action by authorities.
This week the air was the worst it’s been all year in the capital, with microscopic particles that can disrupt breathing and harm health spiking to 75 times the level considered safe by the World Health Organization.
Experts had compared breathing the air to smoking a couple of packs of cigarettes a day. The Lancet medical journal recently estimated some 2.5 million Indians die each year from pollution.
Pandey said the millions of rural folk who had moved to the city understand the problem better than they once did and were trying everything from tying scarves over their faces to eating “jaggery,” a sugar cane product that some people believe offers a range of health benefits.
Masks are these days routinely worn by government workers and regular people on the street.
Volunteers handed out thousands of green surgical masks to make a point about the pollution, but such masks likely have a limited impact on keeping out the tiny particles from people’s lungs.
“This is truly a health emergency,” said Anumita Roychowdhury, executive director of research and advocacy at New Delhi’s Centre for Science and Environment.
She said doctors in recent days have been dealing with a 20 percent spike in emergency hospital admissions from people suffering from heart and lung problems.
Seema Upadhyaya, who heads a primary school, said she has never before witnessed so many children suffering from respiratory illnesses as she has this year. “It’s impacting everybody,” she said.
Roychowdhury said the city’s pollution has been trapped this week by a lack of wind at ground level, colliding winds in the upper atmosphere and cooling temperatures.
The city’s mayor, Arvind Kejriwal, likened New Delhi to a “gas chamber.”
While crop burning had been banned, officials said it’s hard to punish impoverished farmers for continuing traditional methods that have been handed down through the generations.