Srinagar: The ambient air quality of world famous tourist resort of Gulmarg has been found on tests to be clean.
For the first time in history, the ambient air quality at Gulmarg was tested by the state pollution control board on August 9 and results have indicated that the particulate matter (PM)-10 level is 53.07 microgrammes per cubic metre /m3 against the permissible limit of 100 µgm/m3.
An official of the state’s Pollution Control Board told INS that PM-2.5 is 40.95 µgm/m3 as against the permissible limit of 60µgm/m3.
Therefore, he said, as far as PM 10 and PM 2.5 is concerned, they are within the permissible limits.
Comparing the PM-10 and the more harmful PM2.5 limits with some of the polluted cities would show that the air quality is highly clean in the resort. For example, as per a recent report of the World Health Organisation, Gwalior is the most polluted city in India in terms of air pollution having 329 µgm/m3 of PM-10 and 176 µgm/m3 of PM2.5.
The report suggests that the Indian population living outside Kashmir and the Himalayan belt are exposed to air pollution beyond the WHO safe limits. The researchers collected air pollution data for their study from nearly 3,000 cities globally between 2008 and 2015.
Nigeria’s Onitsha city tops the list of highest PM10 levels globally at 594 microgrammes per cubic metre. The other cities are Iran’s Zabol (527), Pakistan’s Peshawar (540) and Rawalpindi (448), Nigeria’s Kaduna (423), Aba (373), Saudi Arabia’s Riyadh (368) and Al Jubail (359) and Afghanistan’s Mazar-e-Sharif (334).
The list of cities with the highest level of PM2.5 globally are Zabol (217), India’s Gwalior (176), Allahabad (170), Patna (149) and Raipur (144), China’s Baoding (126) and Xingtai (128), Saudi Arabia’s Al Jubail (152) and Riyadh (156), and Cameroon’s Bamenda (132)
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