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Delhi dirtiest city on earth, says World Health Organisation
Sydney Morning Herald - May 10, 2014
"The biggest contributor, by far, is cars and other vehicles," says Dr Anumita Roychowdhury, the head of the clean air program at India's Centre for Science and Environment.
"There are 7.5 million vehicles on the road in this city, and we have around 1400 new vehicles on the road every day, so this is where the battle must be fought."
What makes it worse, she says, is that vehicle emissions are impossible to avoid. "We all live near roads, or we spend a lot of our day on the road, so vehicle emissions are constantly around us, getting into our lungs, and into our bloodstream and slowly poisoning the people who live in this city."
So what, exactly, is in the average lungful of Delhi air? More than just carbon dioxide. Other dangerous pollutants include a mix of sulphur and nitrogen oxides, ammonia, carbon monoxide, methane, black carbon, and a range of heavy metals.
"I don't know, and I don't want to know," says Anil Shah, one of Delhi's 100,000 auto rickshaw drivers, who has been driving his rickshaw around the city for at least 35 years.
Three years ago Shah started covering his mouth with a cotton scarf to limit the amount of dust he breathes, but doubts its efficacy. "When I started driving in the 1980s, I felt like I was driving alone, but now everyone has a car. When I smoked, my cough was bad, but now it's much worse."
In the past 10 years alone, the number of cars on Delhi roads has almost doubled from 4 million to more than 7.5 million.
"We made significant progress in the early part of the last decade," says Dr Roychowdhury. "We converted the rickshaws to [compressed natural gas], we got the heavy polluting industries out the cities, we converted two of the three power plants from coal to gas, but then we stopped and now we are paying the price."
According to data supplied by the Centre for Science and Environment, the level of coarse particulates in the air has increased by 75 per cent since 2007 largely thanks to vehicle emissions, with current particulate levels more than 14 times higher than the WHO average.
Delhi officials have tried to brush off the WHO listing of Delhi as the world's most polluted city, instead pointing the finger at Beijing.
"Delhi is not the dirtiest; certainly it is not that dangerous as projected," said A.B. Akolkar, a member secretary of the Central Pollution Control Board. A spokesman for the Ministry of Earth Sciences also said that the WHO had "overestimated India's data and underestimated Beijing's".
Gufran Beig, the chief project scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology said Delhi had peaks of extreme pollution during certain periods in winter, but that overall, during most periods of the year, Delhi's pollution was not as bad as other cities such as Beijing.
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