November 12, 2017
Last week, a six-year-old boy returned home from school in Delhi, fidgety and complaining of breathlessness.
“I thought he was joking and trying to avoid school as he’s never had a history of respiratory problems,” his father told me. Within hours, however, the boy was coughing violently and gasping for breath. The parents put the family in a taxi and drove through the smog to the nearest hospital.
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The boy took three days, two of them spent in hospital, to get better.
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This week, the concentration of the most dangerous particulates in the air – the microscopic PM2.5 particles that can travel deep into your lungs and damage them – has climbed to more than 700 micrograms per cubic metre in parts of Delhi.
Air Quality Index (AQI) recordings have consistently hit the maximum of 999. Exposure to such toxic air is akin to smoking more than two packs of cigarettes a day, say doctors. Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal says the city has turned into a “gas chamber”. Continue reading…