🔗 Share this article

Tuesday brought residents of this heavily contaminated metropolis were faced with inhaling dangerously toxic air that registered in the "alarming" level.

Alarming Air Quality Readings

Several parts of Delhi registered an pollution measurement above 500, which equals 10x the healthy level recommended by the WHO.

Certain monitoring stations, concentrations of dangerous airborne particles hit highs of eighteen hundred, amounting to fifteen to twenty times exceeding acceptable levels.

Fireworks Restrictions and Current Changes

For the past four years, the government had maintained a total prohibition on the distribution and bursting of pyrotechnics during Diwali due to their substantial impact to the dangerous pollution that engulfs the capital as colder weather approaches.

However in recent months, the newly elected city government petitioned the supreme court to propose a modification of the prohibition.

Officials advocated for allowing "environmentally conscious pyrotechnics" – previously doubted by environmentalists as being only about 30% lower impact – as a middle ground between "tradition and public health".

Legal Decision and Implementation

Much to the frustration of public health and environmental campaigners, judges agreed to the request, stipulating that green firecrackers could be ignited during limited hours throughout the celebrations.

Throughout the festival evening, there was extensive disregard of the regulated periods across the capital, with little enforcement regarding whether the pyrotechnics being used were actually the supposedly greener type.

Numerous recording stations throughout the city recorded pollution spiking around midnight to extremely hazardous measurements seen during the festival in at least recent memory.

Regional Effects

The widespread use of pyrotechnics during Diwali also triggered a dispute with adjacent Pakistan, with authorities in Pakistan's Punjab partially attributing deteriorating air quality in Lahore on hazardous particles traveling from India following the celebrations.

Persistent Pollution Problem

The dangerously high levels of atmospheric toxins in the capital have remained as a significant issue for over a decade and a half, with the situation showing no improvement.

Around Diwali, the amount of dangerous particles in the atmosphere has been found to spike to seventy percent above the worst levels ever documented in China's capital, which was once considered as the globally most contaminated metropolis.

Diverse Contamination Factors

This crisis in Delhi is attributed to a mix of multiple factors including transportation pollution, airborne particles, construction activities, rubbish burning and pollutants from agricultural fires in nearby regions of neighboring agricultural zones.

Throughout these areas, rural residents routinely set their fields on fire to clear them quickly, generating dangerous haze that remains stagnant over the metropolitan area as colder air arrives.

Public Health and Economic Toll

Public health and economic consequences on the roughly thirty-three million inhabitants calling home the Delhi area is significant, according to numerous studies.

The contaminated air leads to high levels of neurological, heart and circulatory and lung diseases, and can even lead to malignancies.

Environmental contamination is estimated to be responsible for ten thousand early mortalities per year in the capital.