New Delhi opens first ‘smog tower’; expert says ‘absolute waste’

Move aims to reduce the air pollution blamed for thousands of premature deaths every year, but experts are sceptical.

Workers stand in front of the 25-metre (82-foot) smog tower in New Delhi [Money Sharma/AFP]

India’s capital New Delhi has opened its first “smog tower”, aimed at reducing the air pollution blamed for thousands of premature deaths every year, but experts are sceptical.

Concentrations of tiny deadly particles in New Delhi’s air regularly exceed safe limits by up to 20 times, particularly in the winter when its 20 million people are enveloped in a noxious grey blanket of smog.

Forty giant fans on the 25-metre (82-foot) tower will pump 1,000 cubic metres of air per second through filters that halve the number of harmful particulates in a radius of one square kilometre (0.4 square miles), according to the engineers.

“Today is a big day for Delhi in its fight for clean air against pollution,” Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal said on Monday after the inauguration near the busy shopping area of Connaught Place.

Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, centre, inaugurating the smog tower in New Delhi [Money Sharma/AFP]

The installation “is being looked at in an experimental way. We will analyse the data and if it’s effective, more towers will be built across Delhi,” Kejriwal added.

‘Futile… absolute waste’

The tower cost $2m and critics say erecting a sufficient number to clean the air substantially across the city would cost huge amounts of public money, and that efforts would be better directed at the sources of the smog.

These include vehicle exhaust, heavy and small-scale industry, construction activity, the combustion of waste and fuel and, in winter, the burning of crops in neighbouring regions.

“Let’s just be clear that this is futile, an absolute waste,” Karthik Ganesan from the Council on Energy, Environment and Water told the AFP news agency.

“Now that taxpayers’ money has been spent, let Delhi be the test case for all other Indian cities… to ensure no other city spends on such ideas which we can’t afford,” he added.

Workers walk past the smog tower built to purify the air in New Delhi [Money Sharma/AFP]

India has 14 of the world’s 15 most polluted cities, according to the World Health Organization.

A 2020 study in The Lancet found there were 1.67 million deaths in the country attributable to air pollution in 2019, including almost 17,500 in Delhi.

In 2018, China built a much larger 60-metre smog tower in the polluted city of Xian, but the experiment has not spread to other cities so far.

Source: AFP