Anti-smog towers don’t work. Why is India spending crores on them?
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Editor's note: This is the seventh edition of Thirty-six, The Morning Context’s weekly newsletter on countless ecosystems in flux across India. The Delhi government inaugurated “India’s first” anti-smog tower on Monday. It claims the tower is the first such structure in the country but it really isn’t. But that’s the least of its problems. The tower, built at Connaught Place in the heart of Delhi, costs around Rs 20 crore. It supposedly cleans air within a radius of 1 sq. km. It works on a simple principle: a giant chimney-like structure sucks air from the top, passes it through the 5,000 filters in its chambers, and releases it through the 40 exhaust fans at the bottom. Sandeep Navlakhe, vice president at Tata Projects Limited, which executed the project, said the tower can clean 1,000 cubic metres of air in a second. That means it might take up to three hours to clean the air in the area of 1 sq km. Maintenance is easy, he added. You just spray water jets at the filters once in three months. The tower consumes around …
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