China’s smog — which routinely engulfs major cities like Beijing and Shanghai — is notorious, and it’s recently reached “danger levels.” But the the smog in New Delhi, The New York Times reports, is actually worse.
The air in New Delhi “is more laden with dangerous small particles of pollution, more often, than Beijing’s,” Gardiner Harris writes, and “a very bad air day in Beijing is about an average one in New Delhi.”
The death rate due to chronic respiratory diseases is higher in India than anywhere else in the world.
It was big news when a measure of the concentration of fine particulate matter — the very dangerous air pollution that is absorbed into your lungs — climbed over 500 in Beijing. But Delhi had already reached those “danger levels” on eight separate days this year, Harris writes.
Here’s what smoggy Delhi looks like on the ground.
A New Delhi sunset. “The air was so full of smog particles,” the photographer wrote, “that the sun often disappeared completely into the fog.”
Here the morning smog is so thick you can barely make out the famous Jama Masjid in the distance.
Delhi’s smog viewed from above.
B Mathur / Reuters
India’s presidential palace, Rashtrapati Bhavan, engulfed in smog.
Mansi Thaplyial / Reuters
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