‘The air is killing us’: why Delhi’s pollution problem goes deeper than smog season

AAs winter sets in across northern India – usually around the time of the country’s biggest festival, Diwali – the air in Delhi turns thick and brown with visible pollutants. Inhaling is tasting poisonous fumes. Visibility is often so poor that famous monuments are reduced to a smoky haze on the horizon. It is, as a writer once put it, as if a shroud has covered the city.

For a decade, Delhi has regularly held the dishonorable title of the most polluted city in the world, with other Indian cities close behind. A recent study found that the 30 million people living in and around the capital could have taken almost a dozen years off their lives due to the catastrophic health consequences.

“The air is killing us all,” said Hartosh Singh, between deep, raspy coughs as he pushed his fruit cart through Delhi’s busy Bhogal Market. ‘The government is letting us die so that India can become great. More cars every year, more buildings, more waste, more factories, filling the air with dirt – is that worth more than our lives?”

This week, Delhi’s air quality index (AQI) – which indicates the level of pollutants in the air – rose to 1,700 in some parts of the city. At the worst point of Beijing’s pollution crisis, the highest level the AQI reached was 1,300. The maximum index considered healthy by the World Health Organization is 50.

Much of the blame for the pollution has been placed on farmers who, due to a change in the law in 2009, have only a short period between harvesting their rice crops and planting wheat. The quickest and cheapest way to prepare the fields is to burn them – a practice known as stubble burning. The wind blows the polluting smoke from these fires from the fields of Punjab and Haryana to Delhi, where the smoke often hangs in a thick cloud over the city due to meteorological conditions.

The practice was made illegal in 2015 but still continues, although somewhat reduced. In previous years, stubble burning contributed 50% of Delhi’s pollution in this early winter period. That has now dropped to about 30%.

Experts and environmentalists say farmers are only a small part of the problem and that treating pollution as seasonal — with a unique cause and geographically limited to one city — hampers efforts to solve the problem.

“We need to stop treating air pollution as a winter problem or a farming problem,” said Avinash Chanchal, deputy program director at Greenpeace South Asia. “Data clearly shows that the city suffers from high pollution almost throughout the year. It comes from the transportation sector and the millions of cars on the roads; it comes from coal-fired power stations; it comes from waste piling up in Delhi’s landfills or being burned; it comes from all that non-stop construction of highways and overpasses. Until we focus on all these sectors, we will never get cleaner air.”

Chanchal emphasized that the longer India waited to address the root causes of air pollution, the greater the economic and health costs. “There is no doubt that we are now in a public health emergency,” he said. “But the government is not serious about taking action.”

As the pollution crisis reaches its annual peak, authorities are introducing emergency measures ranging from closing schools to halting construction work and banning highly polluting vehicles from the roads. Expensive smog towers, which have little scientific basis, have been built to supposedly suck pollution out of the air – with little effect – and this year Delhi authorities deployed drones to spray water into the air.

Despite its drastic health consequences, pollution is still not a major political issue in India and rarely features in election campaigns.

Figures show that the millions of cars, scooters and auto-rickshaws on Delhi’s roads are the biggest emitters of PM2.5, the deadly tiny particles that pose a particular health risk. But there are few incentives to move residents out of private vehicles: the metro is seen as poorly connected and expensive, and the bus system is underfunded and overloaded.

Sunil Dahiya, founder and chief analyst of climate think tank Envirocatalysts, said authorities should enforce rules on major polluting industries, including the country’s coal-fired power stations and steel mills.

“So much blame is placed on individual farmers, but where is the accountability for these major polluters in the energy sector, who freely flout the laws and are given free rein to continue pumping pollutants into our air?” Dahiya said. “We need targets to reduce pollution in every sector, with sanctions if they don’t meet them.”

Bhargav Krishna, a researcher at the Sustainable Futures Collaborative think tank in Delhi, said pollution was a “tough problem” for India at a time when it is focused on growth, trying to lift millions out of poverty and providing enough energy to quickly to be able to survive. -growing demands.

Krishna also said that while most of the focus was on Delhi, “pollution is a pan-India problem” and needs to be addressed at the national level. A recent report by Greenpeace shows that more than 80% of Indian cities have air pollution.

“We have to keep in mind that this is going to be a long task,” Krishna said. “We need to rip off the band-aid and address the wound underneath, to fix the structural problems, if we ever want India to breathe clean air again.”