Raipur, Gwalior far more polluted than Delhi

While a veil of smog has been choking Delhi this week, the national pollution watchdog's data reveals Chhattisgarh's capital Raipur, Gwalior in Madhya Pradesh and Uttarakhand's Kashipur are breathing in far more polluted air than Delhi.

Updated on: Nov 1, 2014, 23:25:13 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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While a veil of smog has been choking Delhi this week, the national pollution watchdog's data reveals Chhattisgarh's capital Raipur, Gwalior in Madhya Pradesh and Uttarakhand's Kashipur are breathing in far more polluted air than Delhi.

The air pollution numbers from 252 Indian cities released by the CPCB bring to light the darker side of India's growth story, say experts.

The rise in particulate air pollution levels - that can cause respiratory and heart ailments - in smaller cities has been much more than the metropolises, traditionally considered the worst offenders. In fact, eight of the top 10 most polluted cities are developing ones.

None of these new cities were on India's hazardous air pollution logs five years ago. India's industrial towns and metros like Delhi, Ludhiana, Indore and Kanpur topped the dirty air chart then.

But while media glare over these cities resulted in some corrective measures leading to a slowdown in the growth of pollutants, nothing like that happened in the tier-2 and tier-3 cities.

As a result, Delhi slipped to the fifth position in particulate matter pollution levels from the top rank it held for many years till 2009. Ghaziazbad, which was second on the list in 2010, slipped to ninth in 2011.

"All the attention of the policymakers and the NGOs was on the big cities," said Anumita Roy Chowdhury of the non-profit Centre for Science and Environment (CSE). "In this, we forgot about the environmental hazard brewing elsewhere."

The CPCB data also boggled policymakers as only one Indian city, Mahabalipuram, had lower than standard pollution levels in 2011 as compared to more than one-fourth of the cities monitored in 2008.

In about 60% of the cities, the annual average of the air pollution levels was high or critical. This means that in certain seasons, especially winter, the levels were alarmingly high.

Delhi and nearby areas have seen particulate matter pollution levels touching 800 micrograms per cubic metre of air as winter sets in, where the annual average in 2011 was 262.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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