Agencies
NEW DELHI: A report on air quality in megacities bigger than 14 million by the World Health Organization says Indian capital Delhi is the world’s most polluted city. Cairo comes second, Dhaka third, Mumbai fourth and Beijing fifth.
In fact, 14 Indian cities are among the world’s 15 most polluted cities in terms of particles of pollution per cubic metre of air (see the list below).
Delhi is home to 17 million people and it has 556 vehicles per one thousand people.
As of March 2018, Delhi has 10.30 million vehicles on its roads. Out of these, 64 percent are scooters and motorcycles. Cars and jeeps make up 30 percent of Delhi vehicles.
The Delhi Transport Corporation has 4,027 buses and it carries 3.2 million passengers each day. Delhi Metro ferries 2.8 million passengers each day.
The annual growth in vehicles on Delhi roads is almost 7 percent.
A report by the Health Effects Institute in Boston and the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle in 2017 said that pollution kills more than 1.1 million people in India each year.
While in China strong regulations by the government have levelled off deaths from pollution, India has seen a climb in the number of deaths from pollution from 2010 to 2015.
Here are the world’s 15 most polluted cities in terms of ranking. Out of these 15, 14 are in India:
1: Kanpur (India)
2: Faridabad (India)
3: Varanasi (India)
4: Gaya (India)
5: Patna (India)
6: Delhi (India)
7: Lucknow (India)
8: Agra (India)
9: Muzaffarpur (India)
10: Srinagar (India)
11: Gurgaon (India)
12: Jaipur (India)
13: Patiala (India)
14: Jodhpur (India)
15: Ali Subah Al-Salem (Kuwait)
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