Courtesy: Indian Express (for non-profit, educational use).
Reports from today, November 11, 2017. From: Newsweek, Bloomberg, and NDTV.
(1)
New Delhi’s air pollution has reached levels so toxic that United Airlines flights to the Indian capital city until it improves.
UA canceled their flights between USA and India, after evaluations found the air quality to be around 40 times the World Health Organization’s safety levels. India’s pollution is so bad that the city has turned into a “gas chamber.”
United said the city’s air conditions were severe enough to be considered a natural disaster, and to be avoided like a hurricane or wildfire would be.
(2)
New Delhi’s air quality consistently ranks among the worst in the world, but the city’s air pollution last week registered 10 times worse than the air in Beijing, which is notorious for its smog. Residents complain of burning eyes and itchy throats, and doctors said chest infections and respiratory illnesses have surged.
Authorities ordered 6,000 schools to close, trucks except those carrying essential supplies have been banned from entering the city for a week, and construction projects have been temporarily stopped.
(3)
India’s environment minister Harsh Vardhan appears to question recent global studies that claim lakhs of people die in India due to pollution. Dr. Harsh Vardhan told NDTV in an interview that “to attribute any death to a cause like pollution may be too much”.
The Lancet Countdown 2017 last month said air pollution had claimed as many as 2.5 million lives in India in 2015, the highest in the world. There have been other estimates as well, putting a different number to the lives lost due to air pollution.
The environment minister continued:
“Certainly if you have a diseased lung and if the pollution is continuously damaging your alveoli (air sacks) then one day when you die, you can attribute the cause of death, to some proportion, to maybe pollution. But I don’t think we can generalise and say that millions of people are dying only due to pollution,” Harsh Vardhan told NDTV in an interview.
Dr Harsh Vardhan’s comment is in contrast to his response in February this year when another global study that estimated 11 lakh (1.1 million) deaths due to air pollution in India in 2015. He had then called air pollution a “silent killer” and a “slow poison” that could kill people, particularly children. “It can be a killer also. It can be like a slow poison. Which keeps destroying your alveoli in the lungs at a slow pace,” he had then said.
But Dr Harsh Vardhan wasn’t the environment minister in February. He is now.
And that is another example to show the people in power do not work for the ordinary, suffering people. We know who they work for. They don’t care if millions of innocent children, women and men die of carcinogens in a man-made, toxic environment. India is dying of a toxic environment.
I rest my case. You judge.
Sincerely,
Partha Banerjee
Brooklyn, New York
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Courtesy: Indian Express (for one-time, non-profit, academic use.)
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