Smog tower elicits mixed response among Delhi residents

NEW DELHI:  Delhi government’s ‘war on pollution’ by setting up India’s first smog tower has received mixed response from the beneficiaries in the locality. Incidentally, the air purifier has been set up by removing a lush green plant nursery of the New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC). The smog tower has come up on the campus of Delhi Traffic Police Bike Training Institute situated on Baba Kharak Singh road, just a few meters away from the Bangla Sahib Gurudwara.

“It has just now been constructed. Now let’s see how much this works in cleaning the air. Earlier efforts have not proven much. NDMC area is sufficiently green and clean so establishing a smog tower here does not make much sense to me. But anyway, if the government has done something, there must be some reason,” said a traffic police personnel at the training centre.

However, trampling on an already-green spot to construct an artificial air filter is not something that the NDMC is unhappy with. “It is the government’s decision to remove our nursery from there to establish the smog tower. We were given an order to implement it, hence we did. We still have not gotten any new marked space for the plant pots that have been removed,” said S Chellaiah, Deputy Director, horticulture, North Zone, NDMC, told The Morning Standard newspaper.  

Meanwhile, residents along the Hanuman Road, which is lined by residential complexes, are happy that an outdoor air purifier has been constructed in their vicinity. Some of them even took selfies with the new structure. According to state government, the main features of this innovative outdoor air cleaning system are that it is based on downdraft air flow model in which 40 huge fans shall induct air from the top of a special type of canopy structure at the height of about 24 metres and release clean air to the tune of 1,000 metre cube per second filtered through novel geometry filters of two layers. 

The area of influence is expected to be about 1 km radius around the tower. The 24-metre high tower is powered by 40 fans and 5,000 filters. Another 25-metre-tall smog tower, built by the central government at Anand Vihar, is expected to become fully operational by September 7.