["In some places in Delhi, the levels of fine particles that cause the most lung damage, called PM2.5, routinely exceed 1,000 in winter in part because small trash and other fires are so common, according to scientists. In Beijing, PM2.5 levels that exceed 500 make international headlines; here, levels twice that high are largely ignored." (Excerpted from sl. no. I below.)]
I/II. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/Did-I-jeopardize-my-kids-health-by-moving-to-Delhi/articleshow/47493377.cms Did I jeopardize my kids' health by moving to Delhi?'TNN | May 31, 2015, 11.52 PM IST Gardiner Harris was the South Asia correspondent of the New York Times for the last three years. He writes a very grim account of pollution in Delhi. Many will feel Harris's account is exaggerated, but if this is how expats feel about the city's air, there is a clear risk of Delhi being regarded as a blackhole in Western capitals. That, in turn, could threaten India's quest for economic growth and global stature. Below is the article written by Gardiner Harris in the New York Times. NEW DELHI: For weeks the breathing of my 8-year-old son, Bram, had become more labored, his medicinal inhaler increasingly vital. And then, one terrifying night nine months after we moved to this megacity, Bram's inhaler stopped working and his gasping became panicked. My wife called a friend, who recommended a private hospital miles away. I carried Bram to the car while my wife brought his older brother. India's traffic is among the world's most chaotic, and New Delhi's streets are crammed with trucks at night, when road signs become largely ornamental. We undertook one of the most frightening journeys of our lives, with my wife in the back seat cradling Bram's head. READ ALSO: Top quality masks, anti-UV glasses for Delhi traffic cops When we arrived, doctors infused him with steroids (and refused to provide further treatment until a $1,000 charge on my credit card went through). A week later, Bram was able to return home. When I became a South Asia correspondent for The New York Times three years ago, my wife and I were both excited and prepared for difficulties -- insistent beggars, endemic dengue and summertime temperatures that reach 120 degrees Fahrenheit. But we had little inkling just how dangerous this city would be for our boys. READ ALSO: What IIT scientists are not telling govt about air pollution We gradually learned that Delhi's true menace came from its air, water, food and flies. These perils sicken, disable and kill millions in India annually, making for one of the worst public health disasters in the world. Delhi, we discovered, is quietly suffering from a dire pediatric respiratory crisis, with a recent study showing that nearly half of the city's 4.4 million schoolchildren have irreversible lung damage from the poisonous air. For most Indians, these are inescapable horrors. But there are thousands of others who have chosen to live here, including some trying to save the world, others hoping to describe it and still others intent on getting their own small piece of it. It is an eclectic community of expatriates and millionaires, including car executives from Detroit, tech geeks from the Bay Area, cancer researchers from Maryland and diplomats from Dublin. READ ALSO: Heat & dust raise Delhi's air toxins to critical levels Over the last year, often over chai and samosas at local dhabas or whiskey and chicken tikka at glittering embassy parties, we have obsessively discussed whether we are pursuing our careers at our children's expense. Foreigners have lived in Delhi for centuries, of course, but the air and the mounting research into its effects have become so frightening that some feel it is unethical for those who have a choice to willingly raise children here. Similar discussions are doubtless underway in Beijing and other Asian megacities, but it is in Delhi -- among the most populous, polluted, unsanitary and bacterially unsafe cities on earth -- where the new calculus seems most urgent. The city's air is more than twice as polluted as Beijing's, according to the World Health Organization. READ ALSO: 40% of Delhi schoolkids fail lung capacity test So many of our friends have decided to leave that the American Embassy School -- this city's great expat institution -- is facing a steep drop in admissions next fall. My pastor, who ministers to a largely expat parish here, told me he feared he would lose 60% of his congregants this summer. We nearly left two years ago, after Bram's first hospitalization. Even after his breathing stabilized, tests showed that he had lost half his lung function. On our doctor's advice, we placed him on routine steroid therapy and decided that as long as his breathing did not worsen again, we could stay in Delhi. Or at least I decided that. My wife seriously considered flying home immediately, and at the end of a summer visit to the United States with the kids months later, sobbed for hours on the return flight to Delhi. But after our second year here, Bram seemed fine. His earlier difficulties, though, led me to call some leading air pollution experts. The conversations were sobering. "Knowing that I was putting my kids in a place that compromised their health for their lifetimes would be very difficult given all of the scientific evidence," said W James Gauderman, a professor of preventive medicine at the University of Southern California. He is the co-author of a landmark 2004 study showing that children raised in parts of Los Angeles -- where pollution levels are a fraction of Delhi's -- face significant and probably permanent losses of lung function. Sarath Guttikunda, one of India's top pollution researchers, who moved to Goa, to protect his two young children, was unequivocal: "If you have the option to live elsewhere, you should not raise children in Delhi." These and other experts told me that reduced lung capacity in adults is a highly accurate predictor of early death and disability -- perhaps more than elevated blood pressure or cholesterol. So by permanently damaging their lungs in Delhi, our children may not live as long. And then there are nascent areas of research suggesting that pollution can lower children's IQ, hurt their test scores and increase the risks of autism, epilepsy, diabetes and even adult-onset diseases like multiple sclerosis. It's not just the air that inflicts harm. At least 600 million Indians, half the total population, defecate outdoors, and most of the effluent, even from toilets, is dumped untreated into rivers and streams. Still, I never thought this would come home to my family quite as dramatically as it did. We live in a four-year-old, five-story apartment building that my wife chose because its relatively new windows could help shut out Delhi's appalling night time air. About six months after we moved in, one of our neighbors reported that her tap water suddenly smelled like sewage. Then the smell hit another neighbor and another. It turned out that the developer had dug open channels for sewage that had gradually seeped into each apartment's buried water tank. When we pulled up the floor tiles on the ground floor, brown sludge seemed to be everywhere. Most piped water here is contaminated. Poor sanitation may be a crucial reason nearly half of India's children are stunted. The list of health threats sounds harrowing when considered together, but life goes on and can be quite nice here. Our apartment building eventually installed aboveground water tanks. My children's school and travel in the region are terrific, and many expats are far more influential here than they would be in their home countries. Yet one afternoon this spring, someone in our neighborhood burned something toxic, and an astringent cloud spread around our block. My wife was out walking with a friend, and their eyes became teary and their throats began to close. They bolted back inside our apartment where they found Bram gasping again, for the first time in two years. ***In some places in Delhi, the levels of fine particles that cause the most lung damage, called PM2.5, routinely exceed 1,000 in winter in part because small trash and other fires are so common, according to scientists. In Beijing, PM2.5 levels that exceed 500 make international headlines; here, levels twice that high are largely ignored.*** [Emphasis added.] There is a growing expatriate literature, mostly out of China, describing the horrors of air pollution, the dangers to children and the increasingly desperate measures taken for protection. These accounts mostly end with the writers deciding to remain despite the horrors. Not this one. We are moving back to Washington this week. II. http://www.hindustantimes.com/newdelhi/capital-punishment-delhi-s-poisonous-air-prompts-nyt-correspondent-to-leave-india/article1-1353527.aspx Delhi is unliveable: NYT reporter has every reason to abandon city Rituparna Kakoty, Hindustan Times, New Delhi| Updated: Jun 01, 2015 18:15 IST While the Prime Minister is trying to push India as a global manufacturing hub by promoting industry, the quality of air in the country has raised local and international concerns after the WHO last year declared Delhi the world's most polluted city. (AP file photo) Some call it "capital punishment" that kills slowly; others simply put it as air pollution -- a lethal cocktail of toxic gases spewing from vehicle exhausts and factories mixed with dust and microscopic particles that sticks to human lung walls like industrial sludge. Welcome to Delhi, the capital of Asia's second-largest economy and one of the bottom-ranked megacities for foul air in recent World Health Organization data. Or, goodbye Delhi! The New York Times correspondent Gardiner Harris did exactly that after completing a three-year assignment and his parting shot was an article which whipsaws Delhi's plague, its poisonous air. He cynically demonstrates how the city is annihilating its future generation, which probably will have a very weak heart and weaker lungs thanks to a prolonged policy paralysis on air quality. Harris begins his article with a deeply personal experience when his eight-year-old son, Bram, began gasping one terrifying night nine months after he moved with his family to this megacity. "We gradually learned that Delhi's true menace came from its air, water, food and flies. These perils sicken, disable and kill millions in India annually, making for one of the worst public health disasters in the world," he wrote. "Delhi, we discovered, is quietly suffering from a dire pediatric respiratory crisis, with a recent study showing that nearly half of the city's 4.4 million school children have irreversible lung damage from the poisonous air." The article is another piece in a long list, reprising the rapidly growing developing world's inescapable horror. The WHO says air pollution was responsible for over seven million premature deaths in 2012, one million more than tobacco, and around 88% of the dead belonged to low or middle-income countries. Delhi, with a population of more than 16 million, could be described as the den of this monster because in places such as Dwarka and Anand Vihar, particulate matter pollution was three times the national standard. The city's air is more than twice as polluted as Beijing's, according to the WHO. The booming megapolis is a mother lode of opportunities attracting prospectors from across the world, not to mention the teeming millions from the country's small towns and countryside looking to live their dreams. For some, the dream quickly fades because of the city's unbreathable air and those having an option to leave, pack up and scoot. The prime polluters are vehicles, factories and untrammeled constructions. Delhi adds over 1,000 vehicles every day to its overburdened roads and air; and an overwhelming number of trucks cram its streets at night. The statutory National Green Tribunal recently banned old, fume-belching diesel vehicles from plying in the city and took up the onerous task of checking factories dotting Delhi and its neighbourhood, which are the prime suspects in contributing to the capital's air menace. Unless Delhi and its neighbours clean up their act together, as experts often point out, the national capital will continue to suffer. Environmentalist Vikrant Tongad blamed builders in the national capital region, spanning the states of Haryana and Uttar Pradesh besides Delhi, for the air pollution. "They are violating norms... heaps of soil at construction sites make the air dusty, causing respiratory infections." Much like land-locked Beijing, Delhi's air is governed by its neighbours. Straddling one of the world's filthiest rivers, the Yamuna, the city is buffeted by highly industrialised zones such as Gurgaon, Faridabad, Noida and Ghaziabad, where a housing construction boom ensures a 24x7 blanket of building material dust in the air. A shout away from Ghaziabad, the east Delhi suburb of Anand Vihar recorded 490 on a scale of 500 in the air quality index maintained by the Central Pollution Control Board on May 28. Such "severe" category pollution seriously affects healthy adults. What it can do to people with existing diseases and children can only be imagined. Just as Harris wrote, children are by no means the only ones harmed. Chief minister Arvind Kejriwal had to leave the city for 10 days in March to cure a chronic cough, a byproduct of the poisonous air. The Delhi high court was so alarmed over a report last week about poor ambient air quality on its premises that it hauled up its own maintenance and construction committee for not doing anything on the issue. It also sought to know what action the Delhi government and Centre were taking to restore Delhi's dwindling green cover, which was supposed to be 30% but fell to 10.2% in 2009. Air Quality Index at different places in Delhi last Friday (29th May) Legend 0-50 Minimal impact 51-100 | Minor breathing discomfort to sensitive people 101-200 | Breathing discomfort to the people with lungs, asthma and heart diseases 201-300 | Breathing discomfort to most people on prolonged exposure 301-400 | Respiratory illness on prolonged exposure 401-500 | Affects healthy people and seriously impacts those with existing diseases Click on the timings to know the AQI levels @ 5 AM @ 8 AM @ 6 PM Punjabi Bagh 252 121 Shadipur 237 NSIT Dwarka 190 Mandir marg 500 Anand vihar 303 R K Puram 252 Punjabi Bagh Source: Central pollution control board Get the data -- Peace Is Doable -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Green Youth Movement" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]. 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