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Hong Kong: Asia is home to world’s 100 most polluted cities of the world, and alarmingly, 83 of them are in India, according to World Air Quality Report 2023 released by the Swiss firm IQAir.
IQAir also ranked India as the world’s third most polluted country behind only Bangladesh and Pakistan.
In a further blow to Modi government’s policies towards environment safety and failure on pollution control, the IQAir has ranked Delhi as the world's most polluted National Capital and Bihar's Begusarai as the world's most polluted metropolitan area.
Begusarai is followed in the IQAir rankings by Guwahati in Assam, Delhi and Mullanpur in Punjab.
"All but one of the 100 cities with the world’s worst air pollution last year were in Asia. The vast majority of these cities — 83 — were in India and all exceeded the World Health Organization’s air quality guidelines by more than 10 times", CNN reported citing the data released by IQAir, which tracks air quality worldwide.
Across India, 1.3 billion people, or 96% of the population, live with air quality seven times higher than WHO guidelines, according to the report.
The study looked specifically at fine particulate matter, or PM2.5, which is the tiniest pollutant but also the most dangerous. When inhaled, PM2.5 travels deep into lung tissue where it can enter the bloodstream. It comes from sources like the combustion of fossil fuels, dust storms and wildfires, and has been linked to asthma, heart and lung disease, cancer, and other respiratory illnesses, as well as cognitive impairment in children, CNN reported.
Only 9% of more than 7,800 cities analyzed globally recorded air quality that met WHO’s standard, which says average annual levels of PM2.5 should not exceed 5 micrograms per cubic meter.
India’s air quality, with an average annual PM2.5 concentration of 54.4 micrograms per cubic metre, was better than only two countries - Bangladesh and Pakistan 9n 2023, the study said.
Bangladesh had 9.9 micrograms per cubic metre while Pakistan had 73.7 micrograms per cubic metre. These two, among 134 countries, beat India to become the most polluted and the second most polluted country in the world, respectively.
With an annual population-weighted PM2.5 of 92.7µg/m3, New Delhi edged out Dhaka (80.2 µg/m3) to become the world’s most polluted national capital. Burkina Faso’s capital Ouagadougou, with a population-weighted PM2.5 of 46.6µg/m3, was a distant third on the list.
Senior Congress leader and MP Shashi Tharoor has called the latest ranking a “public health emergency requiring the attention of a responsible government".
"The top four polluted cities in the world in terms of air quality are all in India. Delhi ranks third after Begusarai and Guwahati. This is a public health emergency requiring the attention of a responsible government— which we sadly don’t have", he wrote on social media platform X, originally launched as Twitter.
In 2022, India was on 8th position in the World Air Quality Index. Also, out of the 50 most polluted cities in the world, 39 were in India.
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