CHENNAI: The Supreme Court’s direction to limit bursting of firecrackers to two hours and awareness campaigns on air pollution seems to have had little effect on Deepavali revelers as Chennai’s air quality plummeted to ‘poor’ levels on the festival day on Sunday.
The aftereffects continued and the city’s air quality index (AQI) on Monday morning was as bad as Delhi. At 8 am Monday, the AQI was 256 in Chennai and 282 in Delhi.
Velachery, a residential area that has good green cover with Guindy National Park and IIT-Madras dominating its landscape, was one of the worst hit with AQI of 320 — a hazardous level that falls under ‘very poor’ category.
Sources said firecracker bursting inside IIT-Madras was unusually high this year leading to a spike in pollution levels. Forest officials of the Guindy National Park located near the institute said a black buck, a scheduled 1 animal, and a spotted deer had allegedly sustained injuries due to panic-running inside the IIT campus. The animals are being treated at a private clinic. The condition of the black buck is set to be serious as it suffered injury to its spine and its hind legs got paralysed, sources said.
IIT-Madras may soon be declared no-firecracker zone
The forest authorities said they might consider declaring IIT-M and few other institutions, where there is significant presence of wildlife, as no-firecracker zones from next year to avoid such incidents.
M Jayanthi, chairman, TNPCB, however, said, “Overall, the city’s pollution levels have come down by 40% compared to last year. Manual monitoring was conducted in seven different locations in the city --- Besant Nagar, T Nagar, Nungambakkam, Triplicane, Sowcarpet, Valasaravakkam and Tiruvottiyur ---- to monitor the impact of bursting of crackers during Deepavali. The AQI, observed from 6am Sunday to 6am Monday, ranged between 207 and 365. The lowest was in Besant Nagar and the highest was in Valasaravakkam. The AQI last year was between 345 and 786.”
Shweta Narayan, International Climate and Health Campaigner with Health Care Without Harm, said the official data don’t show the peak levels of particulate matter (PM2.5), which sometimes can touch 800-1,000. Such exposure can be deadly for vulnerable populations especially kids, pregnant women, elderly and people with co-morbidities like heart or lung illnesses.”
Namita Gupta, co-founder and CEO of Airveda, which operates about 33 low-cost monitors in Chennai, said, “There are currently nine Continuous Ambient Air Quality Monitoring Stations operational in Chennai to cover over 400 sqkm area. This is because CAAQMS are extremely expensive to deploy and maintain. We have deployed 40 low-cost monitors in Chennai in partnership with IIT Kanpur and Ericsson that provide real-time and local data that can be used by citizens living in those neighborhoods to make decisions to protect their health.”
The TNPCB has attributed the high pollution levels to unfavourable climatic conditions that were not conducive for the effective dispersion of smoke emanating from bursting of crackers. Even at 6 pm on Monday, a day after Deepavali, the city’s AQI was poor at 236 which can cause breathing discomfort to most people. Almost all the continuous ambient air quality monitoring stations in the city showed the levels of PM 2.5, which is the most problematic pollutant, maxing out to 500.