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Gasping For Life

Isn't the sky blue? "Blue?" asks a puzzled Amit Kumar.

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Isn't the sky blue? "Blue?" asks a puzzled Amit Kumar. He stares at his sketch of a cityscape, and frowns. The cars are red, the trees are green, and the roads are black. And to colour the sky, the six-year-old reaches for a grey crayon. Nearly 10 others like Amit in his 1st standard class in Delhi are painting the sky in similar shades of grey. They are not wrong.

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A filthy grey haze of winter mist, auto exhausts and chemicals hangs lower and longer than ever before in one of the world's most polluted cities. The smog makes your eyes water, coats your lungs with layers of microscopic, noxious soot, and covers you with black grime. It was enough for an incensed Supreme Court to demand that the government do something. And it was enough for a government that has so long ignored the problem to begin high-level meetings on what to do.

Delhi's pollution scenario is India's grimmest, but the alarm bells are ringing everywhere. "The situation in our cities is critical," warns Purushottam Khanna, director of the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute, Nagpur. "If things are left as they are today, the air in our cities will be totally unbreathable." by Samar Harlankar and Subhadra Menon