NEW DELHI \u2014 The planned city of Gurugram, one of India\u2019s industrial hubs, has glass-sided office buildings and swanky, high-rise apartments. But now, according to a new report, it can claim a less desirable distinction: the city with the world\u2019s worst air.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
India holds 15 of the top 20 spots in that category, according to the report<\/a>, which was released this week by Greenpeace and IQAir AirVisual, a software company that tracks air quality data. The Pakistani city of Lahore and Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, also made the top 20, making South Asia \u2014 where governments are routinely criticized for failing to limit emissions and coal use \u2014 an especially toxic region.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAt a country level, weighted by population, Bangladesh emerges as the most polluted country on average, closely followed by Pakistan and India,\u201d the report said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Details from the report, which looked at data from more than 3,000 cities around the world, offer more bad news for India\u2019s nascent movement to curb air pollution. Average levels of the tiny, dangerous particles known as PM 2.5, which can penetrate deep into the lungs and enter the bloodstream, were largely unchanged from 2017 to 2018 in many Indian cities featured in the report.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Other recent studies have cited similarly troubling statistics for India, and for other countries with severely polluted air.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Last year, a report<\/a> from the United Nations Environment Program found that toxic air kills seven million people every year, with most of those deaths occurring in the Asia-Pacific region. A study released by Lancet Planetary Health in December pegged<\/a> the number of deaths in India from pollution at 1.24 million in 2017.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another recent report<\/a> from Unicef found that poor air quality might be permanently damaging children\u2019s brains.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Even as apocalyptic images of smoggy Indian cities have spread on social media, officials have studiously avoided calling the pollution a health emergency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n During a string of days in 2017 when pollution levels in New Delhi, the capital, reached around 30 times the World Health Organization\u2019s safe limit, India\u2019s environment minister, Harsh Vardhan, went on television to say that data from international groups could not be trusted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In January, the government unveiled the National Clean Air Program, a five-year plan to reduce air pollution in 102 cities by up to 30 percent from 2017 levels. But environmentalists said the initiative was underfunded<\/a> and lacked clear mechanisms for achieving its goals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nandikesh Sivalingam, a campaigner for Greenpeace in India, said it was unclear whether the measure was a mere \u201crandom initiative\u201d or something that would truly cut into pollution figures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As India prepares for national elections, which are expected in April and May, politicians have been mostly silent about the toxic air. And many Indians see pollution as a problem confined to the capital region.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe\u2019re still in denial,\u201d said Jai Dhar Gupta, the founder of Nirvana Being, an Indian company that sells pollution masks. \u201cThe priority for 99 percent of Indians is necessities: food, shelter and clothing. Health and environment are not even in the top 10.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Like other developing countries, India has struggled to improve infrastructure and strengthen industry without battering its environment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n China, an authoritarian state, has made strides toward cleaning up its cities in part by bringing criminal charges against polluters. Among the Chinese cities featured in the report, average concentrations of PM 2.5 fell<\/a> 12 percent from 2017 to 2018, with figures for Beijing, the country\u2019s famously noxious capital, reduced more than 40 percent since 2013.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But India is a messy, inefficient multiparty democracy, and environmental rules are often ignored or go unenforced. For those reasons, Mr. Gupta said he worried that the country\u2019s alarming pollution figures would persist unless something dramatic happened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIn the past, tipping points have typically been millions of people dying,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m really saddened to say it, but I think that\u2019s what it\u2019s going to take.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" NEW DELHI \u2014 The planned city of Gurugram, one of India\u2019s industrial hubs, has glass-sided office buildings and swanky, high-rise apartments. But now, according to a new report, it can claim a less desirable distinction: the city with the world\u2019s worst air. India holds 15 of the top 20 spots in that category, according to the report, which was released this… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":131,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/eastasiaandoceaniablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/eastasiaandoceaniablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/eastasiaandoceaniablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/eastasiaandoceaniablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/131"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/eastasiaandoceaniablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3208"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/eastasiaandoceaniablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3208\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3209,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/eastasiaandoceaniablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3208\/revisions\/3209"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/eastasiaandoceaniablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/eastasiaandoceaniablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/eastasiaandoceaniablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}