Menace Of Pollution: Like Cities, Rural India Is Equally Gasping For Clean Air

It’s daybreak in Guwahati and smoke billows into the sky as I take the wheel for my long drive back to Delhi. It is the last week of November, and a nip in the morning air is just enough to set off fog, or smog in this case. The smoke came from burning waste by the roadside. Although the city has a functional garbage collection system, households and roadside vendors burn dumps of leaf and plastic litter. And then there is road dust and ground-level ozone which adds to the deadly cocktail in the air. All this hasn’t deterred the morning walkers and runners, though pulmonologists have been putting out alerts that it is not the best time to go out for such physical activity.  

I leave Guwahati through the new Saraighat Bridge, opened for traffic in 2017. The old bridge, completed in 1962, is still functional but is now ‘one-way’—for vehicles coming into the city. This was the first road-cum-rail bridge on the Brahma­pu­tra, connecting the Northeast to mainland India. At 6 am, the sun is already up—the day begins an hour early in NE and a separate time zone is long overdue—but the great river is shrouded in haze. Like elsewhere, Guwa­ahati is ‘developing’ at the cost of the densely-forested hills, a part of the cityscape. So are the quaint ‘Assam type houses’, which are giving way to rows and rows of apartment blocks. Need­less to say, the city has become very dusty these days, with the ongoing construction work leading to a spike in cases of respiratory illness.  The city’s PM2.5 levels hover around 160 µg/m3, 16 times more than the WHO standard of 10 µg/m3, and the AQI around 165, but no one seems to be bothered. Everyone I met was more concerned about me getting back to polluted Delhi.