Parts Of City In Deep Red As AQI Nears 400 Mark

Another year, another winter of sepia skies, another cycle of itchy throats, burning eyes, flaring allergies and choked lungs.

For yet another winter, Delhi is staring at the brink of a public health emergency, with the air quality index (AQI) on Wednesday evening edging closer to the dreaded, deep red “severe” zone.

Delhi’s overall AQI worsened to 364, according to the Central Pollution Control Board’s (CPCB) 4pm bulletin, a reading in the upper reaches of “very poor”, and the worst yet this season. But at least four areas slipped into “severe” — Mundka with an AQI of 417, Anand Vihar (416), Wazirpur (409) and Punjabi Bagh (408). Bawana and Rohini reported brief spells of severe air as well in the afternoon.

This spike comes in the face of a spate of policies and mitigation programmes — some scientific and many unscientific — by multiple agencies that are again appearing to fall well short of controlling the levels of toxicity that subsume the city’s air from early November.

Experts warned that the readings will only get worse over the next few weeks, and make the inevitable plunge into the most hazardous level on the CPCB’s scale since the present haze draping Delhi is largely down to local pollutants concentrating in the air because of still winds and dipping temperatures. The role of raging fires in neighbouring states is still low because of a favourable wind direction.

According to the Union ministry of earth sciences’ Decision Support System (DSS), around 13% of Delhi’s PM2.5 (ultra-fine particulate pollutants) levels on Wednesday was due to smoke from farm fires, 11.4% from the city’s own transport sector, and 10.4% from neighbouring Gautam Budh Nagar. To be sure, these numbers are only estimates, and DSS does not measure pollutants in real-time.

The DSS estimate for Tuesday said 14.3% of Delhi’s PM2.5 concentration was from Gautam Budh Nagar, around 11.8% from vehicles in Delhi, around 8% from Ghaziabad, and only around 7.2% from stubble burning.