Delhi’s air pollution monitors have recorded the highest levels they can measure | Hacker News Reader

Delhi’s air pollution monitors have recorded the highest levels they can measure

theguardian.com

127 pointsokket34 comments

Being from the region, The couple of days in question were more to relate with climate change than man made pollutants.

There was dust over most of northern India for about 4 days, that was carried by dry winds from the desert in west India and Pakistan.

Having lived in North India (Chandigarh) for more than 30 years, i don't remember such an earlier episode.

Earlier the city i live witnessed seasonal storms, but the sky was clear as a storm passed. But this time the sky was filled with small dust continuously for about 4 days and at noon Sun was looking like moon.

The rains have made things normal. But it was a first of an episode as per my experience.

I mean the article blatantly says this was the dust storm, in the second heading. Followed by a photo of the storm, with a caption saying it's a dust storm.

I landed in delhi yesterday I could not see anything on the land until the flight descended very low for landing. There was an eerie orangish glow blocking thesun. It lookeed like a doomsday scenario.

I was in Delhi a couple years ago when the pollution was also literally off the charts - at the time it was the worst pollution in over a decade.

It totally reminded me of Blade Runner. Whenever the illustrious recent leaders of government in the US talk about loosening environmental restrictions that are killing jobs, I wish they could spend a week in Delhi (with no air filters) every time they said that.

Straight out of the article: "India’s air quality crisis is usually most acute after the Hindu festival of Diwali in autumn, when hundreds of thousands of Indians release firecrackers".

I think Indian Hindus should go easy on their festival celebrations, especially given how it pollutes the already messed up air.

Fireworks are the best part of Diwali. Banning them would go over as well as mandating tofurkey on Thanksgiving. This is a big problem with environmentalism IMO. Thing which propenents think are just common sense get viewed as attacks on a way of life (aided and abetted by exploitative politicians.) and what could be rational public policy debate details into kulturkampf.

I think there is a better solution. Last year New Jersey legalized firework sales and we celebrated Diwali with an arsenal which could make an Afghan warlord jealous. One of our guests visiting from India marvelled at how little smoke there was. So the best course would be to improve the quality of Indian fireworks then everyone wins.

I am not Indian so please take this with a grain of salt.

My senior project was creating a business plan for India. I guess the professor was farming for ideas. The one thing he berated over and over was that due to the multiple municipalities and mass corruption, conducting business between their states is not a trivial matter. This means that there is no group cohesiveness. Pollution knows no borders and I do not think this will be an easy problem for the Indian people to solve due to said internal struggle.

Neither am I, so take with two grains, but from an outside westerner's perspective, it seems the government is quite impotent. I was surprised to find how small the roads are for New Delhi's size. If they can't raise better roads with their clear time saving advantages, perhaps millions of hours per day, it's hard to imagine how they can do much. In this case, the health of the entire population is at risk and the governments apathy rings through it all.

If I had to guess, the cause could be due to how much focus is spent on non-secular issues. There is little time left for issues like better air, water, roads, etc... If this hurdle is cleared, you then have to get past the selfishness and corruption built into the system. Set your gods, ideology and your selfishness aside for half a minute so you can at least breath a little easier. It's going to take some work and sacrifice, but in reality it's not that bad.

To be fair, many US cities also have severe transportation infrastructure problems which governments at many levels are too weak to address

Experience a traffic jam in Delhi first-hand and your analogy to US cities might acquire some nuance. It's really not even close.

There’s a difference between government being too weak to address and the voters not wanting something. It comes up a couple times a decade in Atlanta and the suburbs vote against public train expansion. I see parallels with the housing issues in SF and California.

How does a local government do something if their constituents flat out refuse it?

I am an Indian and I echo your sentiments. Federalism, which was supposed to work really well, is failing at all levels in our country. A single vision to move forward does not germinate and even if it does in one person's mind, it is impossible for that vision to see light of the day. Even a flagship project like the bullet train is unable to take off because of corruption at the grass root level (panchayaths and the like).

In India, a vast majority of the population doesn't realize the growth by letting others grow concept. The predominant sentiment is to grow at someone else's expense, meaning I have to grow and others shouldn't or even if they did they have to grow less than me. This manifests in every step and walk of life. This leads to all sorts of corruption. Some guy who owns a key piece of land won't sell that land for a public project, just because a politician who doesn't want that project to succeed will back him up and prevent him from selling. This happened in Bangalore when a key arterial road was being developed. As soon as word got out, some local politician flooded a key government land with slum dwellers and overnight they occupied that land and prevented the road construction. Stories like this are the norm in any land acquisition.

Of course there are exceptions, and that's how this country is seeing modest growths of 6-8%. I say modest because, our baseline is fairly low, as compared to other economies. I feel so bad, we have the highest inhabitable land mass of any country, some of the most fertile regions, no adverse weather in most parts, bio-diversity to die for. It's like someone handed this climate on a platter, yet we don't realize that. We are just destroying this paradise day by day.

I'm an Indian, and I cannot agree more. The few here who have managed to comprehend the impact are trying to push hard on governing agencies to take appropriate measures. The problem arises when citizens do not take this up as a problem, because there's too much on their plate already. Leads to lesser political pressure.

This is due to appeasement and corruption of previous Government. Government passed a Law which allowed constructing 4 floor building in every area of Delhi. This simply killed the city as you cannot increase the population density by a factor of 4 in a already crowded city.

Secondly they grabbed all the land around NCR(National Capital Region) which resulted in prices of properties reaching simply affordable levels. This only increased the pressure on the core part of Delhi.

It is an example of evil Governance.

> you cannot increase the population density by a factor of 4 in a already crowded city

New Delhi isn't even in the forty most densely-populated cities [1]. The city feels crowded because infrastructure has not developed with the population. If you want to see what happens when a government artificially cap housing supply, visit San Francisco.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_population_d...

I don't disagree completely, Infrastructure development prior to passing such law would have have helped.

There is a lot of land around Delhi to develop the city laterally instead of allowing 4 floor construction on a 50 square meter plots on a narrow street. How to you allow for electricity, water, and commute without creating bottlenecks. Road are already conjested and new ones cannot be constructed easily. You can go underground and that's happening (Delhi Metro Project) but it's neither easy nor cheap to build an underground transportation system under a crowded city. It all comes down to appeasement and corruption going hand in hand.

SFO might be on the other side of the spectrum with its draconian zoning laws though.

Though I agree with your point, New Delhi and Delhi are not the same. New Delhi is a less dense area within Delhi that has many parks, government buildings, monuments and large suburban houses. There are areas of Delhi that are very dense. With any urban comparison, where you draw the border lines is essential and often difficult to do consistently.

An interesting thing to notice from your link, Union City, Guttenburg, and West New York (all in New Jersey) make the list while New York City does not. This is only because of how the lines are drawn.

The air pollution event that the article refers to was for a very short duration & was an episodic event due to a meteorological phenomenon.

The dust storm in the western region started on 13 June around 18:00 hrs and ended on 16 June around 05:00 hrs. The data from the official monitors in one of the western regions of Delhi NCR can be seen here: http://bit.ly/CPCB_Haryana_1Jun-16June2018

The headline in the above article is over-dramatic & is lacking a proper understanding of the actual ground-level monitored situation of those two days. What is more harmful is sustained levels of 500 ug/m3 of PM2.5 pollutants rather than a couple of spikes (each lasting less than a few hours) of 999 ug/m3.

Make the chart bigger.

lol, clearly the best solution. (please note sarcasm.)

Time for logarithmic scale?

isn't pollution a price we, kinda, have to pay to move to the next step? See USA until EPA, China etc... You reach a certain level of industrialization and then let other countries choke

> isn't pollution a price we, kinda, have to pay to move to the next step?

Not this much. When the West industrialised, we didn’t have natural gas or nukes. Today we do. The problem is (a) Coal India is a jobs factory and (b) India’s massive corruption makes regulation more challenging than it was in the West or is in China. (China has done an excellent job of moving pollution away from population centres.)

>>When the West industrialised, we didn’t have natural gas or nukes

Is natural gas cheap in India? Nukes have their own issues. See Chernobyl and Fukushima...unless you build them 1000 miles away in a desert (not feasible--water and transmission issues.) Pollution in horrible and takes lives, but so does poverty. The lesser of two evils might be found somewhere in the middle.

>>(China has done an excellent job of moving pollution away from population centres.)

But they had it there initially. So did the USA, you can still see the old chimneys

Nukes have their own issues. See Chernobyl and Fukushima...unless you build them 1000 miles away in a desert (not feasible--water and transmission issues.)

This is like saying that airships have a lot of issues because of the Hindenburg disaster. Technology has come a long way since either Chernobyl or Fukushima were built! Nuclear plants can be made very safe, and as a bonus won’t contribute to the deaths of millions from pollution.

Well, well, unlike winter, when vehicular emission and neighboring farm burns pollute the sky, this time it's mother nature lifting sands off the desert and dust from the fields. Approx 2 more weeks to go when the monsoon arrives and everything would be back to normal.

It'll be years or maybe even decades before things will be back to normal in Delhi.

Are there any indications that things will get better instead of worse in the next decades?

Not at all, Delhi's population has consistently grown by 1 million a year for the last decade and shows no signs of letting up. The trend towards urbanisation is strong.

The prospect of clamping down on agriculture burnoffs that plague the city during winter is limited too.

Meanwhile China has cleaned up it's award winning polluted cities quite quickly and continues to do so.

> dust from the field

That's a man made problem. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl

China (mainly northern but sometimes western) has dust storms in spring that have similar effects. It got better with tree planting, but once many of those trees died it got worse again.

> Approx 2 more weeks to go when the monsoon arrives and everything would be back to normal.

Wow, that's a very indifferent take on such an alarming matter.

Man, I am appalled at your response. What we are seeing in Delih is beyond alarming. In fact, even the so called normal in Delhi is alarming by the global pollution standards. Please avoid making such flippant comments.

PM2.5 is at a hazardous level in Punjabi Bagh.

http://aqicn.org/city/delhi/punjabi-bagh/

> everything would be back to normal

Which is the 11th most polluted city on the planet by PM2.5 particulate matter concentration [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_polluted_cities_b...

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