Estimates of air pollution in Delhi from the burning of firecrackers during the festival of Diwali

Delhi has had the distinction of being one of the most polluted cities in the world, especially in the winter months from October—January. These months coincide with the religious festival of Diwali. It is argued that air quality gets worse in the aftermath of Diwali on account of firecrackers that get burned during the festival. We use hourly data on PM 2.5 particulate concentration from 2013 to 2017 to estimate the Diwali effect on air quality in Delhi. We improve on existing work by using the event study technique as well as a difference-in-difference regression framework to estimate the Diwali effect on air quality. The results suggest that Diwali leads to a small, but statistically significant increase in air pollution. The effect is different across locations within Delhi. To our knowledge, this is the first causal estimate of the contribution of Diwali firecracker burning to air pollution.

• Publication year

  2018

• Venue

  PLoS ONE

• Publication date

  2018-08-13

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0200371PMID 30102708PMCID 6089419
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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