Clearing the air about Delhi’s pollution problem
In November 2016, the Supreme Court of India declared New Delhi’s air quality a ‘public health emergency’. Widespread protests erupted against the government when the city was engulfed in toxic smog. According to news reports, the PM2.5 levels, or fine particulate matter with a diameter of less than 2.5 micrometers, had risen to 999 mg per cubic metre; 16 times higher than the Indian ambient air quality standard; and 40 times higher than the World Health Organisation standard of 25 mg/m³, on a 24-hour average.
PM2.5 is particularly worrying because the microbes are small enough to enter a person’s blood supply from the lungs.
The court mandated that the Union Government prepare an action plan to address this emergency. In January, a slew of measures were introduced. However, months into the plan, the city’s air quality has been determined healthy for only a few days; and it hasn’t met the WHO guidelines of PM 2.5 even for a day.
Pollution levels rise in Delhi this time of year, owing to two major factors:
- the burning of crops and agricultural waste after harvest season from Delhi and neighbouring states;
- and the festive season that ends in Diwali, typically marked by a spectrum of fireworks.
A team from The Times of India — Kim Arora, Nirmal Sharma and Rishabh Srivastava — hopes to address the urgent and growing problem with their prototype, What are you smoking?
Built at the Delhi Editors Lab back in April, in which the hackathon theme was public health, the Times of India built a progressive web app through which users can keep check of the AQI (Air Quality Index), but also log their health symptoms to track the effect of pollution. This hackathon was organised with support from the New Venture Fund, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, International Center for Journalists (ICFJ), Hacks/Hackers India and hosted by Hindustan Times.
The AQI monitor is updated every hour, sourcing data from 33 cities from the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB). When you log in your symptoms — such as cough, headache, fatigue — you become part of a database, reset weekly. So you can see how many others around you are facing similar symptoms at the time. This symptom logger can be used to crowdsource data for articles.
Within an ‘analyst view’, data on the rise in reported systems as a function of AQI can be extracted for a defined date range.
“Pollution typically peaks in North India after Diwali, because of the firecrackers, crop burning, and generally, the temperature falling to a level where particular matter stays suspended for longer,” says Arora, the journalist on the team. “This is typically when you start to hear stories of rising respiratory diseases and AQI levels going through the roof.”
So while the prototype hasn’t changed much since the hackathon, this is why the team decided to wait until now to take it live. They are looking to roll out their tool as pollution widgets post-Diwali, which falls on October 19 this year. Arora adds:
“This is a good time to roll it out, for a not-so-good reason.”
The tool also includes an embeddable quiz, where you can calculate how many years of life you are losing to pollution, by answering questions about your lifestyle. According to the team, the quiz will work well when embedded within stories on rising pollution, respiratory diseases, waste burning, and so on. It could help readers see the larger issue of pollution and gauge how much they have at stake.
Other embeddables include the AQI monitor and a graph showing levels of individual pollutants.
“We hope this will make our stories richer with the numbers we will crowdsource, and that we can increase reader engagement and awareness with the interactives,” says Arora.
