Harsh Vardhan said “routine precautions” were all that were needed to cope with levels of dangerous pollutants in the air that have exceeded World Health Organization safety guidelines many times over
Environment minister has said the country’s toxic air is no cause for alarm, claiming only “routine precautions” were needed to cope with what doctors have called a public health emergency.
Harsh Vardhan contrasted the pollution choking large swathes of north India, including the capital, with the 1984 gas leak in Bhopal that killed at least 25,000 people and remains the world’s worst industrial disaster.
Bhopal, he argued was “an emergency situation where you have to panic and you have to see what you have to do,” he said in an interview published on the CNN-18 news channel website on Tuesday.
But on the current smog crisis he said: “I’m not saying we shouldn’t do anything about it, everyone has to respond to what he is supposed to do. But there is no need to spread panic among the people.”
Discrediting global reports on pollution-related deaths that has placed India on number 1, Vardhan said ‘no death certificate has cause of death as pollution.’
