00:00But our top focus tonight and we are calling it what it should be called an air emergency.
00:06Delhi's pollution levels have once again spiked on Diwali day and today a day after they remain
00:12very severe. In fact, several parts of North India remain covered by a blanket of smog.
00:19Some of the worst, most polluted cities in the world at the moment as we speak are in the country.
00:27Remember this on Diwali day when the nation should have celebrated with firecrackers.
00:32We've seen firecrackers go well beyond the Supreme Court directives and we've seen a surge in stubble
00:41burning in farm fires in Punjab. The combination, the double whammy of these two factors means that
00:48Delhi faced its most polluted Diwali day in five years. The AQI on Diwali day in 2023 was 218
00:56in 2024. It went up to 328, went up to 345 last year. This year it was 376. That's only
01:05the average
01:06remember. The AQI for the day after Diwali though is 344, a slight improvement from 351 last year.
01:15Now, the main pollutant this season is particulate matter 2.5 which means particles that are 2.5
01:22micrograms or less per cubic centimetre in terms of density. Now, our DIU team has prepared graphics
01:29that show that there is a sudden spike on Diwali day which you can see on the screen.
01:37In parts of the city, the AQI jumped to 500, in parts it went up to 1000 and at this
01:46point,
01:46the AQI is 384 which remember is only an average at the moment and is still very much in the
01:55very
01:55severe category. And therefore, the fact is the AQI levels remain astronomically high in the national
02:04capital. 375 frankly is unacceptable. It puts Delhi in the very severe category. The day has also seen
02:14a sudden jump in the number of farm fires in Punjab but I want to start today with Delhi because
02:23the
02:23fact is while Delhi celebrated Diwali with crackers, the crackers violated all the Supreme Court guidelines.
02:32There was very little enforcement and worse still and which is really what is should trouble us all is
02:38that in many of the recording centres, the data went blank at midnight even though these data centres were
02:46monitoring the rising pollution. All of this is leading to question marks over the quality of governance
02:52and whether the government was trying to hide the data from the public. Our correspondent Shreya Chatterjee
02:58spent the entire night tracking just how pollution on Diwali night has left a city choking. Take a look.
03:13Delhi celebrates Diwali with dhoom, dhamaka and lots of dhooma. Fireworks clouded the national capital sky
03:24on Sunday evening. Most air monitoring stations in Delhi hit a PM 2.5 reading of 500, the maximum on
03:37central
03:38pollution control board website. At ITO live streaming board, the PM 2.5 numbers inched closer to 1000.
03:50Just look at what this AQI monitoring station is clocking right now. This is Dwarka Sector 8, PM 2.5
03:59level above 1500,
04:02the PM 10 level above 2000. That is something which should scare all of us.
04:10On the ground, India today reality check found serious gaps in pollution monitoring. Many of the stations did not record
04:18readings for several hours after midnight.
04:23We are now at the NSEIT. We are standing at the NSEIT monitoring station. The board is basically
04:31the data of live monitoring. But now it's 12am. It's time for Diwali night. And you can see the monitoring
04:42station
04:53The rules were already set by the Supreme Court.
04:57Only green crack is allowed.
04:59That too, between 8 p.m. and 10 p.m.
05:02But the two-hour window permitted was openly flouted.
05:08The pollution data shows Delhi's AQI on the day of Diwali
05:12was the worst in five years.
05:15The Supreme Court's decision to allow fireworks
05:18has reignited the debate on what takes precedence,
05:22public health or religious festivals.
05:26With Sriya Chatterjee, Bureau Report, India Today.
