It’s not the first time it has happened

DELHI, Sunday – The incident that took place on the second day of the third Test between Sri Lanka and India at the Feroz Shah Kotla Stadium where players had to leave the field struggling for breath and even vomited due to air pollution is not the first time it has happened in the city.

Here’s a Time line of some of the incidents:

In November 2016, two Ranji Trophy matches scheduled to be played in Delhi – Gujarat against Bengal at the Feroz Shah Kotla, and Hyderabad versus Tripura at the Karnail Singh Stadium – were called off without a ball bowled. The air pollution, to put it mildly, was appalling. Several players complained of headaches and dizziness, while almost everyone experienced burning sensations in their eyes. After match officials inspected the conditions on the first two days, the matches were postponed and relocated.

RP Singh, part of India’s World Twenty20-winning squad in 2007, was part of the Gujarat team, and he tweeted a collage of pictures, with the words: ‘precaution is the best medicine #dressingroom #DelhiSmog #delhipollution #RanjiTrophy’. Almost all the Gujarat players seen in the pictures are wearing masks. A third image, taken from the dressing room viewing area, is so hazy that you can barely make out the floodlight tower on the other side of the ground.

Schools were closed in the city not long ago because the Air Quality Index reached crisis levels. But when Sri Lanka’s cricketers, who are fortunate enough to breathe far cleaner air on their island, complained about the smog, and emerged after lunch wearing masks, the general reaction appeared to be indignation, feigned or not.

Javier Ceppi, who was tournament director of the recently concluded FIFA Under-17 World Cup, the first such event that India has hosted, made his views quite clear on Twitter. “You can't host sport events in Delhi from Diwali till end of Feb, at least,” he wrote. “It is a fact. We had to accommodate our whole schedule to avoid it and others should also think about athletes health first #DelhiSmog”

Nic Pothas, Sri Lanka’s South African-born coach, spoke of an unprecedented situation. “It is not normal for players to suffer in that way while playing the game,” he said at the post-play press conference.

“From our point of view, it has to be stated that it is a very, very unique case. I thought all the officials, the Match Referee and others handled the situation very well. When it is a new situation for everybody, it is not easy to make decisions. I feel for the umpires and I feel for the Match Referee. But the job of myself and the manager is to make sure that the players are safe.”

On November 8, pollution surged so high that some monitoring stations reported an Air Quality Index of 999, way above the upper limit of the worst category, Hazardous. +United Airlines canceled its flights to India’s capital because of poor air quality. Visibility was so bad that cars crashed in pileups on highways and trains had to be delayed and canceled.

Hospitals reported a 20 percent surge in patients with pollution-related illnesses, and doctors have declared a public health emergency. +Delhi’s chief minister went as far as to call his city a “gas chamber”.

WHY THE AIR GETS POLLUTED

What’s unique about Delhi’s smog is that the smoke from the burning outside the city is mixing with pollution inside the city — from construction, vehicles, and fires the poor use to cook and keep warm. This mix of rural and urban pollution intensifies in the cooler winter months and the air currents through the region have been unusually slow, allowing the dirty air to linger.

The airborne particles and toxic chemicals that make up the smog and have choked the 19 million residents of the metropolitan area, where merely breathing the air was, at its worst, like smoking 50 cigarettes in a day. – ST