Following intense Diwali festivities, the city of Delhi was engulfed in hazardous smog on Monday morning as the Air Quality Index breached 350 across the capital and surpassed the severe 400 threshold in multiple localities, compelling municipal authorities to roll out anti-smog guns to combat the rising pollution levels. Designed to simulate natural rainfall, an anti-smog gun operates via a vehicle-mounted water tank equipped with high-pressure propellers that atomize water into 50-to-100-micron nebulized droplets, which are shot up to 150 feet into the atmosphere at 30 to 100 liters per minute to absorb floating dust and trap PM2.5 and PM10 particles before dragging them down to earth. While widely applied in urban centers as well as industrial settings such as mining, grinding, coal processing, stone crushing, and post-demolition cleanup like that of the Noida twin towers, environmental experts maintain that these mist cannons provide merely localized and temporary mitigation limited strictly to the immediate area and time of spraying. The acute deterioration follows Sunday’s 24-hour average AQI of 376, which already categorized Delhi’s air as ‘very poor’ across 22 monitoring stations and ‘severe’ across 12 others—with Jahangirpuri topping the chart at 463—before intense night-time firecracker bursting further inflated pollution metrics past 400 on both official and private monitoring equipment.
