India’s toxic smog hides Taj Mahal and delays flights
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NEW DELHI - Toxic smog obscured India’s famed monument to love, the Taj Mahal, as well as Sikhism’s holiest shrine, the Golden Temple in Amritsar, and delayed flights on Nov 14, becoming too thick to see through in several places.
The city of Lahore in neighbouring Pakistan ranked as the world’s most polluted in winter’s annual scourge across the region, worsened by dust, emissions and smoke from fires burned illegally in India’s farming states of Punjab and Haryana.
In the city of Agra, the Taj Mahal was barely visible from the gardens in front of the 17th-century monument, while dense fog wreathed worshippers at the Golden Temple in Punjab, television images showed.
Delhi flights faced delays, with tracking website Flightradar24 showing 88 per cent of departures and 54 per cent of arrivals were delayed.
Officials blamed high pollution, combined with humidity, becalmed winds and a drop in temperature for the smog, which cut visibility to 300m at the city’s international airport, which diverted flights in zero visibility on Nov 13.
More patients – particularly children – flocked to hospitals.
“There has been a sudden increase in children with allergies, cough and cold... and a rise in acute asthma attacks,” Dr Sahab Ram, a paediatrician in Punjab’s Fazilka region, told news agency ANI.
A man jogs while the sky is enveloped with smog after Delhi’s air quality was classified as hazardous on Nov 14.
PHOTO: REUTERS
The minimum temperature in Delhi fell to 16.1 deg C on Nov 14 from 17 deg C the previous day, weather officials said.
Its pollution ranked in the severe category
Pollution in New Delhi is likely to stay in the severe category on Nov 15 as well, the Earth Sciences Ministry said, worsening to very poor later, or an index score in the range of 300 to 400.
The number of farm fires to clear fields of paddy stubble in preparation for the planting of wheat in north India has risen steadily this week to almost 2,300 on Nov 13 from 1,200 on Nov 11, the ministry’s website showed.
In Pakistan, Lahore, the capital of the eastern province of Punjab, was rated the world’s most polluted city on Nov 14, in live rankings kept by Swiss group IQAir. The authorities there have also battled hazardous air in November.
The province has already shut schools, halted some building work,
