power plants in a symphony of air pollutants. Breathing Mumbai’s
inversion-trapped air, they say, is the equivalent of smoking twenty cig-
arettes a day.
India’s capital city, New Delhi, is even worse than Mumbai.
Tourists get a full measure of it when they travel by teeming road or
slow train to the tourist mecca of Agra. Just south of New Delhi, they
encounter a hell’s circle of industrial towns, including Faridabad and
Ballabgarh. The Hindustan Timeshas called Faridabad “a gas chamber,”
where “citizens are dying a slow death due to the high level of pollu-
tion.”
Faridabad has fifteen thousand three-wheel diesel vehicles known
as auto rickshaws, many of them refugees from Delhi, which now
allows only rickshaws powered by compressed natural gas. After the
rickshaws grew out of control in 2002, they were ordered to operate
only on alternate days. Faridabad also has eighty dyeing and printing
industries, which pollute rivers and groundwater. There are also two
hundred electroplaters, whose by-products include contaminated waste
water, cyanide, and hydrochloric acid. In 2001, 45,000 people sought
treatment for respiratory problems in Faridabad, says Dr. S. P. Singh
Bhatia, the region’s chief medical officer.
According to a 1997 air quality survey by India’s Central Pollution
Control Board, sixty-nine of India’s seventy principal cities are moder-
ately, highly, or critically polluted year-round. The locally popular term
for the hazy clouds that blanket these places, causing sore throats and
aggravating allergies, is “fog.” Journalists who stay at the “five-star” Taj
View Hotel in Agra are well acquainted with the fog because it com-
pletely obscures the view of this most famous of landmarks. Tourists,
1.8 million of them annually, now reach the Taj Mahal in a small fleet
of electric vehicles, a belated and probably futile attempt to preserve
Shah Jahan’s seventeenth-century palace from the eviscerating effects
of pollution.
The Taj Mahal is no longer the dazzling white of tourist brochures.
Although it still looks, in the words of a nineteenth-century British sur-
veyor general, to be made from “pearl or of moonlight,” it now has a
distinctly ivory cast, shading into yellow. The Indian Conservation
Institute claims that the yellowing is simply a build-up of dirt and the
80 Jim Motavalli