- Saturday, May 04, 2024
By: Shubham Ghosh
NEW Delhi, the capital of India which fights a deadly air pollution that results in deaths of thousands of people every year, has come up with its first “smog tower” that aims to reduce the pollution level but experts were not convinced.
According to engineers, 40 giant fans in the 25-metre tower will pump 1,000 cubic metres of air per second through filters to halve the amount of harmful particulates in a radius of one square kilometre (0.4 square mile). Amounts of tiny deadly particles in Delhi’s air regularly exceed the safe limits by up to 20 times and the situation turns particularly grave during the winter when the city’s 20 million residents find themselves enveloped in a grey blanket of smog.
Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal welcomed the move after the tower’s inauguration at the city’s busy shopping area of Connaught Place. He said the first installation is being booked in an experimental way and if it is found to be effective, more towers will be built across Delhi.
The tower cost $2 million (£19,630) and critics have questioned the wisdom in spending that much of public money. They said setting up more such towers to clean the air substantially across the city would lead to huge expenses and advised that it would be better to put efforts at the sources of the smog which include emission of vehicles, heavy and small-scale industry, construction activity, burning of crops in neighbouring regions in winter, etc.
“Let’s just be clear that this is futile, an absolute waste,” Karthik Ganesan from the Council on Energy, Environment and Water, a Delhi-based not-for-profit policy research institution, told AFP.
“Now that taxpayers’ money has been spent, let Delhi be the test case for all other Indian cities… to ensure no other city spends on such ideas which we can’t afford,” he added.
India is home to 14 of the world’s 15 most polluted cities, the World Health Organisation has said.
A 2020 study published in the Lancet medical journal said that 1.67 million deaths in India were attributable to air pollution in 2019 and in Delhi alone, the number was almost 17,500.
China, which too combats the challenge of air pollution, built a much larger 60-metre smog tower in 2018 in the polluted city of Xian but the experiment was yet to spread to other cities.
