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South Asia Is Smothered in Toxic Air, Report Finds

The Taj Mahal as seen through polluted air in Agra, India, in January.Credit...Andrew Kelly/Reuters

NEW DELHI — The planned city of Gurugram, one of India’s industrial hubs, has glass-sided office buildings and swanky, high-rise apartments. But now, according to a new report, it can claim a less desirable distinction: the city with the world’s worst air.

India holds 15 of the top 20 spots in that category, according to the report, which was released this week by Greenpeace and IQAir AirVisual, a software company that tracks air quality data. The Pakistani city of Lahore and Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, also made the top 20, making South Asia — where governments are routinely criticized for failing to limit emissions and coal use — an especially toxic region.

“At a country level, weighted by population, Bangladesh emerges as the most polluted country on average, closely followed by Pakistan and India,” the report said.

Details from the report, which looked at data from more than 3,000 cities around the world, offer more bad news for India’s nascent movement to curb air pollution. Average levels of the tiny, dangerous particles known as PM 2.5, which can penetrate deep into the lungs and enter the bloodstream, were largely unchanged from 2017 to 2018 in many Indian cities featured in the report.

Other recent studies have cited similarly troubling statistics for India, and for other countries with severely polluted air.

Last year, a report from the United Nations Environment Program found that toxic air kills seven million people every year, with most of those deaths occurring in the Asia-Pacific region. A study released by Lancet Planetary Health in December pegged the number of deaths in India from pollution at 1.24 million in 2017.

Another recent report from Unicef found that poor air quality might be permanently damaging children’s brains.

Even as apocalyptic images of smoggy Indian cities have spread on social media, officials have studiously avoided calling the pollution a health emergency.

During a string of days in 2017 when pollution levels in New Delhi, the capital, reached around 30 times the World Health Organization’s safe limit, India’s environment minister, Harsh Vardhan, went on television to say that data from international groups could not be trusted.

In January, the government unveiled the National Clean Air Program, a five-year plan to reduce air pollution in 102 cities by up to 30 percent from 2017 levels. But environmentalists said the initiative was underfunded and lacked clear mechanisms for achieving its goals.

Nandikesh Sivalingam, a campaigner for Greenpeace in India, said it was unclear whether the measure was a mere “random initiative” or something that would truly cut into pollution figures.

As India prepares for national elections, which are expected in April and May, politicians have been mostly silent about the toxic air. And many Indians see pollution as a problem confined to the capital region.

“We’re still in denial,” said Jai Dhar Gupta, the founder of Nirvana Being, an Indian company that sells pollution masks. “The priority for 99 percent of Indians is necessities: food, shelter and clothing. Health and environment are not even in the top 10.”

Like other developing countries, India has struggled to improve infrastructure and strengthen industry without battering its environment.

China, an authoritarian state, has made strides toward cleaning up its cities in part by bringing criminal charges against polluters. Among the Chinese cities featured in the report, average concentrations of PM 2.5 fell 12 percent from 2017 to 2018, with figures for Beijing, the country’s famously noxious capital, reduced more than 40 percent since 2013.

But India is a messy, inefficient multiparty democracy, and environmental rules are often ignored or go unenforced. For those reasons, Mr. Gupta said he worried that the country’s alarming pollution figures would persist unless something dramatic happened.

“In the past, tipping points have typically been millions of people dying,” he said. “I’m really saddened to say it, but I think that’s what it’s going to take.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: South Asia Has Almost All the Cities With the Most Toxic Air. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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