Harsh Vardhan contrasted the pollution choking large swathes of north India, including the capital, with the 1984 gas leak in Bhopal that killed at least 25,000 people and remains the world's worst industrial disaster.
Bhopal, he argued was "an emergency situation where you have to panic and you have to see what you have to do," he said in an interview published on the CNN-18 news channel website on Tuesday.