Same here. I live in Nairobi. The air quality here isn't all that good, but I acquired a newfound appreciation for it when I visited Gurgaon in India a few years ago. When I first landed, I actually mistook the dense smog for clouds. I came pretty close to passing out once while waiting for a taxi on the street. I was basically in air-conditioned rooms the entire time I was there, save for a short trip to Delhi, which felt noticeably better.
I've been equally surprised when visiting other cities with cleaner air than my own. It might be one of the things that pushes me to uproot my life here and try make a home someplace else.
That satellite image of the haze is scary. Scarier still is how the deterioration of air quality in the cities is affecting health. (The WHO estimates ~15 million bronchial asthma patients in India.)
You haven't experienced air pollution if you haven't breathed in the evening air in Mumbai or Bangalore during the rush hour.
Haven't been here long enough (~12 months) to anecdata that, but it's generally recognized that government policies are increasing air quality rapidly in many major cities. Example policies: routinely spraying water on the roads in dusty areas and near construction sites, banning motorbikes from city centers, banning the import of second hand vehicles, encouraging electric vehicles, moving polluting industries away from population centers, increasing industrial regulation, reducing opportunities and increasing penalties for corruption. I have a German friend who builds air quality monitoring systems for export here and he said that restaurant kitchen air vents are actually one of the worst urban air polluters now. Another is construction. He said India's cities, especially Delhi, are literally off the charts (sensors incapable of registering pollution levels that high) and that, compared to India, China has things well under control.
Not in Bangalore or any number of smaller towns and cities in India. The air pollution is low, I personally enjoy high temperatures though Bangalore is usually overcast. I don’t know the state of blackouts.
Outdoors: prevention. Eliminating major pollution sources is what matters most. A good rain helps.
India's major population centers face a similar problem to Los Angeles: they're backed by a major mountain range (the Himalaya) which tends to bottle-up pollution. The second problem is that there are are roughly 30x the people living in that area (~500 million vs. ~15 million for LA).
Indoors: it depends on the specific threats you're looking to eliminate. Generally these include:
1. Particulates. A HEPA or electrostatic filter should help.
2. Ozone: Houseplants.
3. Other contaminants, including sulfer oxides and nitrogen oxides: possibly activated charcoal or zeolite.
I find it hard to believe that the author could not escape pollution.
The standard thing to do is to get an apartment in the tallest building you can find, and then use an air filtration system. Plus, every Indian city has a few neighborhoods where the rich live. These are normally clean.
London is really not that polluted. It rains too much to be very polluted. AQI is currently 88 in the worst areas. In China many cities are often 150-200 range. India is off the charts, my friend who makes commercial air quality sensor arrays said most sensor tech maxes out way below ambient Indian levels and readings cannot therefore be trusted - nobody knows how bad it is.
that's just not truth unless you live in the biggest cities, it's not really an issue in most of the places, for instance I travelled across Thailand for months many times and only place I would consider dirty regarding air quality would be Bangkok
Yes! I was in delhi and kathmandu and wished that i had some mask to filter out the awful air pollution. My lungs and throat felt sore, and in the end i developed a cold which eventually led me to being bedridden for a day. I cant fathom how the regular people can tolerate that toxic from day to day, it's just awful. Maybe they cant but the overabundance of mopeds and lack of sidewalks makes me think otherwise.
Cars are that well sealed, and aren't designed for that kind of filtering.
At air pollution levels that high more filters for use in a home won't move enough air through the filter fast enough to matter and the filters will quickly clog and stop working. You can see examples of this in reports of US and Australian wild fires over the last few years.
For things like schools and offices you need a really large and sophisticated HVAC system to deal with that amount of shit in the air. I'd be surprised if any buildings in Dehli have systems like that.
I was in Delhi in January/February a couple years ago and the air quality index looked the same as the image from the article around Salem, OR every day I was there. Some nights I’d check the stats and it’d be around 600. The depressing thing is you end up getting sort of used to it, albeit with a bad cough.
The effects of our reckless destruction of the environment are sadly in your face every day in many parts of the world.
Tap water , not drinkable as is. Most houses I've seen have a water filter. We personally used to use one of these[0]
[0] https://www.pureitwater.com/IN/
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