Dehli Air Pollution is Seven Times Higher Than Beijing

India is taking over from China as the country with the worst air pollution. Dehli levels of dangerous particles (PM2.5, 2.5 micron) are about seven times higher than in the Chinese capital Beijing.

An Indian health ministry official said the city’s pollution monitors did not have enough digits to accurately record pollution levels, which he called a disaster.

A major factor behind the high pollution levels at this time of year is farmers in neighboring states burning crop stubble to clear their fields.

SOURCES- BBC, Twitter
Written by Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com

51 thoughts on “Dehli Air Pollution is Seven Times Higher Than Beijing”

  1. Generally, one’s tummy does not acculturate very well. I would not think everyone in town would be Indian. And I suspect there will be ethnically Indian kids who are born here going there too. They get a taste of India without being overwhelmed. India can be very intense on the senses.
    And it is not like they can’t drive somewhere and take in the American thing on the weekend.
    Networking and all that, yes, that might need a bit of work. Maybe a lot of interactions with other US schools.

  2. I wonder how much of the cost of my car is Service. I have this idea that the Service portion will be growing. Especially since in a few years I will call for a car to pick me up and take me to where I am going. The car will be driverless.

  3. A large portion of the cost is designing the items, designing and programming the machines that make the items. And programming the systems that order the items and control the supply chain that produce the item and gets it to you. And then there is the advertisement that make you aware of the item. Services is the larger portion of all First World economies. The more automated manufacturing is the greater part of the economy Service becomes.

  4. We are offshoring far more than you think. As for the difference in pay that isn’t the factor. The factor is the difference in cost. The cost of a good programmer once you include benefits and providing an office is about $200K. A company will offshore for a 10% or more cost saving. By the way companies will offshore whatever is offshoreable like engineering, reading xrays, legal research, costumer care, etc. Whatever service we do in America that doesn’t require us to be physically in contact with a customer.

  5. I was in China recently, even in the Guanzhou area where a lot of manufacturing was happening in nearby cities, pollution was significantly better compared to 2007, when I visited the place last. I am sure some pollution was moved to Western China such as Changdu, that is because these areas were not industrialized before and were cheaper for the factories. I don’t deny that moving the pollution away from Beijing was partly motivated by Chinese leadership breathing the air there, but you can’t deny that significant progress had been made across the major cities in China and Eastern borders in general. If you compare the level of industrialization and the number of cars on the road, India is not remotely in the same league as China, yet the top ten most polluted cities are mostly in India. No city anywhere in China is nearly as polluted as Bombay. That, is the difference between a weak government and a strong one.

  6. A fairly significant part of what is attractive about going to a USA university, is that you mingle with, learn from, network with, acculturate to, the American students.

    An all-Indian university loses that.

  7. Hilarious. Pollution in Beijing is down because the “strong” Chinese Communist Party dictators ordered upwind from Beijing sources of pollution to be MOVED, not fixed, not eliminated. MOVED to areas where their filth will not pollute pristine Beijing resident Chinese Communist leadership lungs and instead be inhaled by the little people.

  8. Trump got elected by half of the country based partly on his anti-immigrant stand and you think you can bring large groups of Indians to the U.S.? What percentage of Indians would have the money to pay for the much higher cost of living in the U.S.? You do know that U.S. colleges take foreign students if they make the cut right?

  9. I’d like to do an almost inverse. Build a university in the US catering to Indians. Plenty of good Indian food, media, and many classes in Indian languages as well as in English. If they don’t get insanely good grades they can’t go to college in India. Some come here and get gouged by high prices, and there is the culture shock. A university that has good standards, Indian inspired architecture, in the US, without the absurd fees and Indian friendly could do very well…have tens of thousands of students perhaps over a hundred thousand.
    Some might want to stay. I have no problem with that.
    If I were a billionaire, I think I would try this.

  10. Sounds like a business plan. I am not optimistic that this will work out for India, but you are welcome to give it a go.

  11. Trump is decoupling to protect U.S. jobs, therefore the only nation he
    would like to take China’s place is the United States.

  12. Mayhaps the biblical commandment of the Shabbath, a day when even lighting a small fire is a crime, could bring some relief.

  13. There is a lot of farm land and such. Not uninhabited exactly, but sparsely populated.
    They can build everything to Western standards even the water supply.
    And certainly the Indian government must want to do this for it to happen. My whole point was that this is a choice that, I think, India has available to it…that could earn good money. And I think it is something they are well suited to do. English is not a rare language there. That is the biggest hurtle right there to other countries doing this. 125 million Indians speak English.

  14. These are American Insurance companies insuring Americans. In the case of Medicare, part of the U.S. government. Even if it happen in India, law suits will happen in the U.S. Medical tourism has been around a long time. Do you see a single Insurance company looking at Indian services as part of their offering? There must be a reason they don’t.

  15. If we want to choose somewhere in the world to build a city from scratch, India would not be high on my list.

    • India doesn’t have lots of spare uninhabited land. Lack of inhabitants is not a feature of India. Well there are deserted areas, but they are deserted for a reason.
    • India does not have a friendly political and legal system. Even the Indian government has problems getting any sort of big project through the minefield of National, State, provincial and local governments with their overlapping areas of power, responsibility, and different legal systems (like the USA, but arguably worse)
    • While India does have lots of well educated people who are available cheap (by western pay standards), the less educated staff, (the cleaners, the cooks, the person who will change bedpans and wash dishes) tend to be WAY below western standards. I’ve experienced a stay in a very high end Indian facility, and we still all got sick… it turned out that “we MUST have bottled water” was passed down the food chain to someone who interpreted this as “refill these bottles from the tap”.
  16. Ahh… the classic USA issue of litigation. I’d forgotten about that.

    Yeah, the only way Americans can get cheap healthcare is if you start buying the health insurance from other countries too, so they can operate under a functional rule set.

  17. “The Mexican culture is way more familiar to Americans than Indian culture”.
    I am talking about building a city from scratch in the Western style. Everyone would speak English there, there would be familiar restaurants. You would hardly notice the difference. Sure you would have some Indian restaurants and such, but that would be a choice.

  18. “…they need to convince the HMO and Medicare to extend coverage to facilities in India.” Should be pretty easy. At half price insurance saves a bundle, and to encourage it they could give you a fraction of the savings. I am not saying we wound not have to make some adjustments in policies, but saving money on healthcare is necessary.

  19. There are lots of prisons where if you want to visit a prisoner there is a glass wall between you and the convict. Now I ask you what is the difference between a high resolution teleconference and that? You want 3D…then 3D glasses…whatever. More convenient if you ask me. The family could be located anywhere.
    There are a lot more people who would like to see a reduction in incarceration costs.

  20. And stuff will be made where lowest salaries can be given, and where
    coughing beats starving. I suspect that place is not Switzerland.

  21. The issue is, the facilities would be staffed with doctors and nurses that are not accredited by the U.S. institutions. So the first accident that happened, the insurance companies would be on the receiving end of a law suit for the medical fail. No insurance company would stick their neck out like that.

  22. Given that the CCP seems to pride itself on simultaneously being as evil as ISIS, the Chetniks, and the Nazis combined, how about India just improves and *nobody* takes China’s place?

  23. I personally have been in Beijing on days when the private machines in people’s apartments (yes, everyone has their own meter because they don’t trust the official numbers) were well over 1200 (somehow the private particle meters don’t have a problem getting a 4 digit display).

    And, to confirm, the privately recorded numbers from the people I know have clearly (boom, boom) improved over the past couple of years.

  24. If I was looking to retire overseas from the USA, I’d be looking at the Caribbean island nations.

    With respect to medical treatment, isn’t the point that these non-USA locations are cheaper? Why would insurance refuse to deal with them if they are cheaper? You’d be more likely to have the insurance companies decide to stop offering US treatment (unless you get the Gold level plan. Or above.)

    What you would see if non-US medical treatment became a big deal is political pressure from major medical companies and/or AMA and Nurses’ Union to outlaw such deals.

  25. You can’t get

    shoes from India, TVs from Vietnam and bulbs from China

    if all those places decide

    They don’t have to industrialize. Services is where the money is.

    That’s the point. Somebody has to make stuff.

  26. No need to worry, you can get shoes from India, TVs from Vietnam and bulbs from China. You will be able to buy even more keyboards(Taiwan) with all the money you saved.

  27. Offshore jailing would never work. This means that the family who wanted to visit would have to fly all the way there. In the era of America First, it should not be too hard for them to convince their congressman to put a stop to it. Offshore medical treatment is a possibility, but it is already happening now. To grow from here, they need to convince the HMO and Medicare to extend coverage to facilities in India. I believe this is a non-starter. Until the major insurance would allow such a thing, we won’t see any major movement. The level of care is irrelevant if the Insurance would not allow it. Retirement, India is competing with Mexico for the money. The Mexican culture is way more familiar to Americans than Indian culture, so except for a few that are adventurers, they won’t go there em mass. I have never been to India, but every single person I met that went there as a tourist said that they won’t be going back soon due to the filth and squalor that they see there. Seems that getting people to return as tourists is the first step before any of these things will happen.

  28. Numbers were not higher. In the article you provided a link to they topped out at about 800 PM2.5 India is over 999 PM2.5 And it is anyone’s guess how high it really is because the machines only go to 999. Just comparing the pictures, you can tell the Indian smog is much worse.
    Though, this is not coal soot. This is mostly farmers burning stuff.

  29. I think what I would be pushing in India would be offshore jailing, offshore surgeries, and other treatments, offshore sanitariums, maybe some offshore eldercare.

    I think they can have a level of care that is far higher than we can afford to have in the West and for less.
    Find some location that has natural beauty and less extreme weather and none of that smog, and build large and lovely facilities for taking care of millions of institutionalized people and of course have great hospitals for medical vacations.

    The eldercare I am thinking about would be for those who have no family, or have family that never visit anyway. Though facilities could have high resolution, large screen, teleconferencing rooms for anyone who wants to use them. It might be possible to make things less confusing for Alzheimer’s patients. Bring their favorite furnishings and such. Make the rooms more like their old home (maybe with movable walls). So Alzheimer’s care might be viable too. Here we just put someone in a box room. There we can afford something that works better.
    If prisoners escape it should be very easy to track them down. They would know where they are at, and realize there is no point to escape.

    Even regular retirement communities makes sense. You can make a totally western city for American and other Western retirees with infrastructure more familiar to them. Restaurants more familiar to them, etc. India would still make money. And when they can’t care for themselves, eldercare.

  30. You can’t have everyone banging away at a keyboard for a living. Looking across the room, I need shoes, light bulbs and televisions occasionally.

  31. India has significantly less resources to deal with pollution, at all levels. This is a well known given, which makes the existence of this article both puzzling and superfluous.

  32. I don’t know what you are smoking but I would like to have some. Offshore provided at most a couple of million jobs. They are not that high paying because that is the whole reason for offshoring. Let’s say, you can charge on average $10,000 per year for an offshore head, that comes out to 20 or 30 billion, a lot of money for sure, but a drop in the bucket in the overall economy. This compared to cell phones, which has a sale of 1.5 billion units per year. That is just cell phones. The number of jobs provided by industrialization is several order of magnitude larger than offshoring. It also provide a way to move up the value chain. Can you name a single software company that come out of India besides flipcart? Even Flipcart did not fare that well and was eventually sold due to lack of profits. If India does not industrialize, they will only have good employment for a few million and the rest will still be in poverty.

  33. Didn’t NBF report years ago that India, Pakistan and Iran were all significantly worse than China for urban “air” quality?

    China gets the bad PR here because they are rich enough that there are middle and upper class people to complain.

  34. The Third World population isn’t as stupid as most First Worlders think. They know their government is useless and corrupt. They are often powerless to fix it. Like in America, the government divide the population into groups and have the groups fight against each other. That way they are busy killing each other while the government and the elites steal everything. Sounds a bit like here.

  35. Decoupling? When did that happen? Our balance of trade with China went up. What happened is that China stopped buying our farming products.

  36. They don’t have to industrialize. Services is where the money is. My old company just off shore their entire IT department to India. India can make more money being the IT Shop for the world than it can make making cell phones.

  37. Pollution is a public good. Just like the fishes in the sea etc. It needs a strong government to manage. Unfortunately, democracy and third world often equals weak government. This does not bode well for all third world democracies wanting to industrialize. They will kill most of the citizens before they get there.

  38. In the year 3130, people will be naturally selected to breathe carbon monoxide and ozone… it will be the healthiest kind of air..

  39. Dunno. To me it seems that third-world complacency is fast losing its ‘right’ to keep ignoring government’s culpability in causing the problems spoken of in this article’s text. Graft only goes so far at covering the sins of innocent-poverty.

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