NEW DELHI: As the toxic smog season in India’s capital has just begun, with those unable to escape cancer-causing poisonous fumes saying the hazardous impact on health is already taking its toll, Delhi is keen to use artificial rain to fight air pollution this year, its Environment Minister Gopal Rai said on Tuesday.

New Delhi regularly ranks among the world’s most polluted capitals, with a melange of factory and vehicle emissions exacerbated by agricultural fires blanketing the city each winter, stretching from mid-October until at least January.

Cloud-seeding — the method of triggering rain by seeding clouds with salts — was considered to curb pollution in 2023 too but the plan did not materialise due to unfavourable weather conditions.

“I appeal to the federal environment minister...now in Delhi and north India, the pollution has reached the border of 400,” Rai told reporters, referring to the air quality index (AQI) score on Tuesday.

“The next 10 days are quite crucial...help us get permission for artificial rain, call a meeting,” Rai added.

About a third of Delhi’s 39 monitoring stations showed a severe AQI score of more than 400 on Tuesday, a level which affects healthy people but is more serious for those fighting disease. An air quality score of zero to 50 is considered good.

Doctors at private hospitals in Delhi and its suburbs said they had seen a spike in patients with respiratory illnesses since Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights celebrated last week, when revellers violated a ban on firecrackers.

“We are seeing more patients due to pollution related flare up of asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and bronchitis. There is an approximately 20 per cent to 30 per cent increase in patients,” said Prashant Saxena, senior director for pulmonology at Fortis Hospital.

Factory worker Balram Kumar returns home exhausted from work, but then is up all night coughing. “I am barely able to sleep all night,” Kumar, 24, told AFP as he waited outside a special pollution clinic, set up at the government-run Ram Manohar Lohia hospital.

“My chest hurts every time I cough. I have been taking medicines but there is no relief,” said Kumar. At C K Birla Hospital in industrial hub Gurugram, doctors are seeing more than 50 patients with pulmonary complaints every day, some of whom also need hospitalisation, said Kuldeep Kumar, head of critical care and pulmonology.

Published in Dawn, November 6th, 2024