Indians fight for their every breath

Air quality is a serious health problem for New Delhi – the most polluted city in the world.

An Indian woman holds her child and watches a firecracker light up during Diwali, the festival of lights, in New Delhi, India, on October 23, 2014. Asthmatics say the festival of lights is a bad time Show more

NEW DELHI // As Diwali firecrackers erupted across the city, Sharad Kumar found himself increasingly unable to breathe.

The firecracker smoke hung low over Delhi, and Mr Kumar, an asthmatic, had to reach for his inhaler several times.

“Diwali is always a bad time for me,” said Mr Kumar, 28, a burly trainer in a south Delhi gym, on Wednesday. “I try not even to step out of my house, but the smoke seeps in nevertheless.”

Delhi’s air has become more and more polluted over the years, as Mr Kumar and every other Delhiite knows.

According to the central pollution control board, 43.5 per cent of Delhi’s children have respiratory problems and diminished lung function.

Even so, the city’s residents have not been able to tell precisely how bad the pollution is because of unreliable data on pollutant levels and lax air quality standards.

Last Friday, India finally launched a new air quality index for 46 cities, which will track the levels of eight pollutants to come up with a consolidated air quality number.

At the moment, the government only releases masses of raw data on various pollutants, making it difficult to understand the significance on air quality.

The new index “will provide the common citizen one colour, one number and one description so that he can understand what is the level of air pollution”, said Prakash Javadekar, India’s environment minister.

The index is modelled on the colour-coded system used in cities across the world, such as Beijing, notorious for its filthy air. A red alert, for example, will signify a high level of pollutant on a particular day.

But Delhi gives even Beijing a run for its money. In May, the World Health Organisation (WHO) found that Delhi had the most polluted air in the world, with an average concentration of fine particulate matter of 153 micrograms per cubic metre, compared with Beijing’s average of only 56 micrograms. Other Indian cities were placed well over the 100 microgram per cubic metre mark.

At the time, Indian officials said WHO’s rankings were misleading or inaccurate, acknowledging only that Delhi matched Beijing in pollution levels.

Anumita Roychowdhury, head of the air pollution team at the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), a non-profit based in Delhi, said the WHO used the government data that was available.

“But that doesn’t necessarily mean that they reflected the most recent conditions,” she said. “For one city, they used data from 2010, for another, from 2011, and so on. That was a problem.”

India passed an Air Act in 1981, aimed at controlling air pollution. There are now monitoring stations in nearly 300 towns and cities.

But the majority of these rely upon manual monitoring systems; only stations in the 16 biggest cities now provide automatic, real-time pollution data.

Although Delhi’s monitoring stations provide enough data to indicate how bad the quality of its air is, there is still a need to improve the accuracy of measurement. “Quality control and quality assurance are still big challenges,” Ms Roychowdhury said.

India’s air pollution standards also far lower than international norms. The pollution control board’s “permissible limit” for particulate matter less than 2.5 microns is four times the limit of the WHO.

Similarly, the board’s “permissible limit” for particulate matter less than 10 microns in size is three times as high as the WHO.

A former board official told The National that the broader definitions of "permissible limits" in India contributed to a lack of pollution control.

“If India needs to be more stringent about its quality of air, it needs to adhere to stricter standards,” he said.

Pollution control boards at the state level also refrain from reporting the most accurate data possible, even if it is within their capacity to do so.

An investigation by the Economic Times newspaper, published last week, found that state pollution control boards put out date averages over 24 hours, rather than time-lapse data where the peaks and troughs will show how bad the air quality can get.

In India’s biggest cities, including Delhi, some monitoring stations are in relatively pristine pockets, which lowers average pollution numbers.

Deploying more automatic monitoring stations, rather than relying on manual data collection, could solve some of these problems, Ms Roychowdhury said.

“The only way this new air quality index will truly work is if India quickly expands its real-time automatic collection of air data.”