Are happy days are here again? And will they stand and last? For at the end of it all, don’t we all crave for happy days? Well, it seems so. For a city where often gets to hear about some form of negative or the other, often changing vagaries of political games making for harsh headlines, with regular upheavals like expensive living costs, rising pollution and the growing menace of traffic making things bitter than they should be- one hardly gets to hear a cheery piece of news from the national capital.
Isn’t it?
Yet, at the backdrop of such murky narrative, it makes for a remarkable piece of news that the current air quality in Delhi is the best that it has been in the past 55 days.
There have been parts of the city that have been touched by slight rainfall but that has done enough to clear the polluted air and thereby, improving the overall air quality of Delhi.
Why this is being perceived and rightly so as a massive relief is the fact that at a time where much of the city’s pockets experience “hazardous” quality of air, for the better part of the day, the city’s denizens have been greeted with a refreshing and much-needed change.
Most of the 37 air quality monitoring stations in Delhi recorded AQI in the ‘satisfactory’ category. Pusa registered the best AQI of 64.
Elaborating more on the pleasant quality of air in Delhi, Business Standard shared:
An AQI between 0-50 is considered ‘good’, 51-100 ‘satisfactory’, 101-200 ‘moderate’, 201-300 ‘poor’, 301-400 ‘very poor’ and 401-500 ‘severe’. An AQI above 500 falls in the ‘severe plus’ category.
Weather experts said parts of Delhi and its suburbs received rains on Wednesday and Thursday, improving the air quality further. Also, the share of stubble plume in Delhi’s pollution was negligible as Punjab and Haryana received light rains for the third consecutive day on Thursday, they said.
It went on to further add, ” Mahesh Palawat, a senior scientist at Skymet Weather, a private forecaster, said with the western disturbance moving towards east, the wind direction in northern plains will change to northwesterly and wind speed will dip.
“But that won’t affect the air quality much. The AQI is expected to remain in the moderate category on Friday,” he said.
That being said, one wonders just how was the quality of air in the neighboring states of Punjab and Haryana?
Most areas in neighbouring Haryana and Punjab recorded “satisfactory” or “good” air quality as winds gusting up to 15-20 kilometers per hour have been clearing the pollutants in Delhi-NCR faster.
What one certainly hopes is for the air quality of Delhi to stay that way for the cold days ahead lined up in December. Won’t that be a welcome respite from the worsening pollution?