New Delhi, apart from being our nation's capital and one of the largest cities in India, has been getting more familiar like any other world cities after recording with the severe and alarming rise of air pollution and its people and the nation's important and powerful institutions and monuments have been breathing and painting with the dirt, dangerous and polluted air for the past few years.

Despite implementing multiple efforts and mechanisms, the city has been ratified with the increasing air pollution that had left the people to undergo deep smog, uncertainty, and insecurity for their lives. The prevailing and deteriorating air quality has brought major concerns and upsetting rank while compared to the other major world cities. According to the recent survey of the World Health Organization (WHO), Delhi has been named as the city with the worst air quality unlike in 1600 world cities that were surveyed. While being named as the worst city, it has majorly contributed to the deaths in India caused due to air pollution as it has been estimated that about 1.5 million people die in India every year due to polluted air.  The alarming pictures of air in Delhi have reportedly been causing severe damages to the lungs of about 2.2 million including children that would possibly affect the immune system and cause headaches, sore throats, coughs, fatigue, lung cancer, and early death and by having these severities, its unimaginable that how the National Capital Region has been going through the calamity for the past two years - the period where the air quality drastically worsened.

While Urbanization and population density have been cited as major reasons for worst air quality, the issues like lack of active monitoring and priorities, the rise of motor vehicles, emissions from power stations, firecrackers and burning the crops and farms in vicinities of NCR are inevitably contributing to worst air quality. On 25th November 2017, the Supreme court ordered to ban the sale of firecrackers in the city with the view of lessening the catastrophe but its certain that it added no remedy to prevailing air quality and to tackle the situation, the Delhi government has directed to reduce the vehicles running on the road and the embassies of the countries and the international businesses in Delhi are proposing to reduce the staffs and providing air purifiers and masks to their employees.  However, it's with no assurance that the other Indian cities can claim that the air qualities are safe and Chennai has been the recent example in becoming the Delhi way.

The residents of Chennai have started this week with unfortunate skies of early morning as for the past few days, Chennai has been encountering the blurred and dusky skies over the city that had brought in more concerns as, by the existing conditions, Chennai will most likely join Delhi and will overrule Delhi for having worst air quality. Since the start of the week, the city has been accounting for the air quality that exceeds the safe and recommended level of the World Health Organization and the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB). On Wednesday, the pollution control board has recorded with a PM2.5 level of 128.71 ug/m3 ( the level that will severely reduce visibility and lead the air to appear hazier) in Adyar and 122.05 ug/m3  in Manali. The levels of PM2.5 have been considered as critical and important as the size of the particulates and pollutants are small with having the capability to enter the human body that will cause stern ailments and diseases in the respiratory system and the current air quality has been speculated to hit more worsening levels that would ground unsafe, insecure circumstances in the city.

Despite the alarming levels of air quality and fog that had disturbed the city's residents, the state government of Tamil Nadu and the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) have been failing to admit that Chennai has been getting affected like Delhi. The state revenue minister has claimed that the air quality levels in the city are safe while the secretary of revenue department has asserted the people not to follow the messages and rumors that were aired in social media and stated that the government has been closely monitoring the air quality. Keeping aside the claims of the state government, the independent weather watchers have cited that Chennai has always been under bad air quality and the sudden uncertainty among the people has mounted after the high degree of awareness and attention over Delhi pollution. The weather experts have underlined that the weather conditions, deforestation, vehicles, and large scale industries as the main reasons that replaced the sea breeze to pollute the air in the city and the thermal power plants in Ennore contribute to major air damages.

Air pollution reminds us that 'every action has an equal and opposite reaction' and nature drives its counter-reaction for what we have presented and its high time that before we start counting the cities with uprising calamity, the governments have to place the countermeasures to tackle the dangerous epidemic as air pollution reveals the worsening side of our country.