Artificial rain brings no change to ITO's air quality

NEW DELHI: After drizzling thousands of litres of water on Wednesday in ITO, the air quality recorded at the spot has hardly changed so far, raising a question in the government's plan to spend money for this process.

The fire department deployed four water-jets and sprayed around 75,000 litres of water for around 50 minutes between 4 pm and 5 pm on Wednesday. The sprinkling was done from Vikas Minar.

But data from CPCB's air quality monitoring station at ITO revealed that the measure had little effect on pollution levels. The level of PM2.5 — ultrafine particles that can penetrate deep into our lungs — continued to escalate even after the aerial water sprinkling.

From 106 ug/m3 (satisfactory category) at around 4 pm, the level of PM2.5 in the region shot up to 129 ug/m3 (very poor category) by 5 pm. By 11 pm, it had shot up to around 227 ug/m3.