We are officially in a pandemic, which means countries all over the world are shutting down and declaring temporary lockdowns in order to manage the highly contagious virus.

We are suffering a lot of consequences due to these lockdowns, which are less than ideal. Not only is our mental health suffering from lack of social activities and sunlight, but tons of businesses are suffering many financial losses. Additionally, our personal lives are suffering.

It is easy to feel like everything is going wrong and yeah, things have been better. However, there is a bit of good news to come from this whole situation: skies in India are miraculously beginning to clear up.

About a week ago, Indian government initiated a lockdown on the country in order to control the spread of the deadly virus.

There are a lot of pollution problems everywhere, but India is perhaps the country that is most acquainted with the issue. 21 of the 30 most polluted cities in the world are in India, according to IQAir AirVisual’s 2019 World Air Quality Report.

Ghaziabad, a satellite city of the capital New Delhi in northern Uttar Pradesh state, is the world’s most polluted city. It has an average PM 2.5 concentration measurement of 110.2 in 2019.

To make it easier to understand, that is 9 times the amount that the US Environmental Protection Agency verifies as healthy.

It turns out that India going on lockdown not only slowed the spread but there was also an extra added bonus: the lockdown helped clear up their skies.

Ever since the lockdown, the pollution dropped by an outstanding 71%.

With everyone practicing social distancing, restaurants, markets, shops and places of worship have closed down. Public transportation and construction has also come to a halt.

The result is a scarily empty city, but one with far less pollution due to all of these things being temporarily suspended.

It is not ideal that all of these places and events are shut down, however it is significantly decreasing the amount of smog and lingering, suffocating levels of pollution.

Blue skies? In India?

It is starting to become apparent that clear blue skies can exist in India, and while the circumstances are not great, it is still a beautiful thing to see… It is something that locals thought they might never see!

Many of the harmful pollutants that were being released by vehicles and power plants have significantly decreased.

“I have not seen such blue skies in Delhi for the past 10 years,” Jyoti Pande Lavakare, co-founder of Indian environmental organization Care for Air and author of the upcoming book Breathing Here is Injurious To Your Health, said. “It is a silver lining in terms of this awful crisis that we can step outside and breathe.”

A similar climate change was also seen in Italy earlier this year, with major changes across several of its cities like Venice.

We wish that India was experiencing this magnificent change under better circumstances, but at least there is a beautiful silver lining to be found in a time of global darkness.

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Source: Bored Panda