Don’t hold your breath!

12 March, 2017

Air pollution in New Delhi. Photo: alvpics

A diplomat friend of mine, returning home after less than three years’ service in India, was asked at his exit medical examination how many packs of cigarettes he smoked a day.

by Hon. Dr. Shashi Tharoor, MP, The Week

When he protested that he was a staunch non-smoker, the doctor commented that X-rays of his lungs showed otherwise. But my friend had never lit up. All he had done, poor soul, was to breathe New Delhi’s air, three smoggy winters in a row.

It really is that bad. The New York Times’ former India correspondent Gardiner Harris, in a famous article in 2015, explained that he was leaving his post prematurely because merely living in New Delhi was damaging his children’s health. Describing the asthmatic travails of his eight-year-old son, Harris wrote that New Delhi was “suffering from a dire paediatric respiratory crisis, with a recent study showing that nearly half of the city’s 4.4 million schoolchildren have irreversible lung damage from the poisonous air.” Harris felt that he and other expatriates were “pursuing our careers at our children’s expense”. He concluded that it was “unethical for those who have a choice to willingly raise children here”. So he picked up his kids and left India.