Not just Delhi, the air in Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Mumbai too is killing you

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates one person dies of air pollution-related causes in India every two minutes. The headlines in newspapers and TV news have focussed mostly on the smog over New Delhi in the recent weeks.
But, it is not just the residents of the national capital who are succumbing to air quality or the lack thereof. You are no better off if you live in Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Mumbai, Hyderabad, or Chennai. You and your dear ones are dying faster than you would in places with cleaner air.
The following analysis of air pollution data, easily available with the wide use of air quality monitoring technology, together with a health event I recently went through, tells us how we Indians court significantly impaired lives — or even death— each day we continue to live in our large, polluted cities.

Surfacing for air

I split my time between Delhi and Bengaluru. I have the best of both worlds — the greenery, parks, wide roads of the national capital and the weather, gentle people, young energy of India’s tech capital.
Or, so I thought.
About two weeks before Diwali, I was hit by a nasty bout of asthma in Delhi. I was asthmatic as a schoolboy and have had occasional episodes of breathlessness in my adult life, but this one was the worst I had been in some 10 years. I didn’t have to get into hospital, but for about 10 sleep-challenged days, I had to go through nebulisation, steroids, shots, and bronchodilators that made my lungs feel like a stretched rubberband.

Once recovered, I moved to Bengaluru temporarily with an intent to rest my lungs. My first reaction when I stepped off the plane at the Kempegowda International Airport was that the air smelt different. Delhi has the highest levels of fine dust — measured by what are called PM2.5 and PM10 dust particles — among Indian cities. Near where I live in central Delhi, you can actually feel your nasal hair and cilia trapping the dust. I kid you not.
The Bengaluru air was a relief compared to Delhi’s, but something still was not right. My short walk to the metro station in the morning would leave me breathless.

Dust to dust

I decided to look up the pollution numbers of the two cities. Air quality is normally measured by an index of five pollutants: particulate matter or fine dust, carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, and ground-level ozone.
But, what about fine dust — which my doctor says is the primary trigger for my asthma? And, how do Indian cities rate against peers globally on this metric? The only comparable data for this is from the WHO, which tracks fine dust in 3,000 cities across 103 countries. First, some good news even if it is so in a twisted way: 98% of cities in low and middle income countries do not meet WHO standards for air quality.

That is, if you live anywhere in the developing world, your lungs are pretty much done for and the chances are that you will see lives cut short around you. The WHO calls air pollution, caused by high concentrations of fine dust “the greatest environmental risk to health — causing more than 3 million premature deaths worldwide every year”.
I turned to How India Lives, one of the smartest public data crunchers in the country (descriptor at the end of this copy), to help me make sense of the WHO data. See the graphic below (mouse over the bars to see individual city PM2.5 numbers).