Delhi is going through an emergency with air pollution levels rising way past the ‘very severe’ category. A thick haze has descended on the capital city and visibility is so poor that Delhi airport has diverted 32 flights to other locations.
The hashtag #DelhiAirEmergency is trending on Twitter since morning and everyone is crying out loud about the pathetic quality of air that is causing not only major inconvenience, but also health issues to the general public with hospitals around the city witnessing a steep rise in the influx of patients citing respiratory problems.
But, the ministers in the Modi government seem to be living in another world and are busy tweeting information that is either irrelevant or far from addressing the concerns facing the people of Delhi.
First in line is none other than the Union Minister for Environment, Forest and Climate Change Prakash Javadekar. The Minister tweeted in the morning put out a tweet telling his followers to ‘start their day with music’, this at a time when Delhi is facing an emergency with schools shut and people forced to wear face masks.
Earlier, the Environment Minister had accused Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal of playing politics on the pollution issue and said that the Centre had organized interstate meetings between the North Indian states to address the problem. This claim later turned out to be untrue when a document surfaced, showing that Javadekar had himself cancelled the earlier meetings scheduled in September and October between the environment ministers of the state.
Then came the tweet from Harsh Vardhan, the Union Minister for Health and Family Welfare. In his tweet, the Minister advocated the health benefits of eating carrots, saying that it helped against pollution-related harm to health. This resulted in some hilarious, some strong reactions on Twitter, here are some of them. But first, take a look at the tweet which elicited these reactions.
But perhaps, this message from UP Minister Sunil Bharala takes the cake. In a video message he said that stubble burning is a natural system and repeated criticism of it was unfortunate. He then went on to suggest that yagyas should be held by governments to please Indra (the God of rain) and he will take care of the issue.
