On Tuesday morning, the air quality in India’s capital under a widely used index stood at 485. While that is almost five times the threshold for healthy breathing, it felt like a relief: The day before, the reading had shot up to 1,785. Infinitesimal air particles were still clogging lungs and arteries, but it was possible to see sunlight again, and to smell things.
“My eyes have a burning feeling during these periods of pollution,” said Vikram Singh, 58, an auto-rickshaw driver in central Delhi, who noted that he also tires more quickly. “I don’t know what else is happening to my body, on the inside.” He earns less, too, just $6 per day instead of his usual $8.30.
Every year this suffocating smog accompanies the drop in temperatures as the plains of north India shed their unbearable heat for wintertime cool. And like clockwork, political leaders roll out emergency measures intended to quit making the problem worse. Yet India seems powerless to reduce the effects of this public health catastrophe, as its politicians stay busy trading blame and trying to outmaneuver one another in legal battles.
The haze was so shocking this week that Delhi’s chief minister, Atishi, who goes by one name, declared it a “medical emergency” endangering the lives of children and older people. The Supreme Court, whose members also live in the capital, chided the national government for responding too slowly and ordered special measures: halting construction work and blocking some vehicles from the roads. Schools were closed indefinitely to protect students.
For middle-class Delhiites, the emergency measures have taken on an uncanny resemblance to life during Covid-19 lockdowns. There was a familiarity to the work-from-home mandates, idle children cooped up in the house and spare surgical or N95 masks rummaged from drawers.
But only a small proportion of Delhi’s citizens can afford such luxuries. Debu Jyoti Dey, the finance director at a nonprofit in the development sector, wore a handkerchief tied below his eyes as he trudged between a subway station and his office. At least, he said, he was going indoors.
“I feel congestion in the chest, I feel sneezy, sometimes drowsy,” he said. But “people who are working on the road, they suffer a lot more” — people like drivers, curbside vendors and day laborers. “And if I remained at home, how would I earn my living?”
Mr. Dey said that governments were failing to “reach at the root causes” of the pollution because it was not a voting issue among the poor, who must “think about free electricity and water and not bother” about the health of their lungs.
The rich can afford to ignore the smog because they “use machinery and technology and stay indoors,” he said. The middle class — he means people like himself — are too few in number to matter to politicians but unhappily “put our lives at stake” alongside the poor.
For those who are able to stay at home, that can help a little, said Dr. Sundeep Salvi, president of the Indian Chest Society, based in Pune. There are “at least some health benefits,” if it means moving from a pollution level of 450 to 300, say. Those benefits, however — like masking with a simple bandanna — are marginal, and easily overstated.
Dr. Salvi also recommends staying hydrated, performing a kind of nasal wash twice a day and keeping houseplants in living spaces. None of these measures are enough to make a difference in any epidemiological study. But unlike industrial-grade HVAC systems with air filters, they are affordable to all households.
The immediate cause of the dreaded autumn smog is the drop in temperatures, creating a “thermal inversion,” when hotter air forms a stubborn layer atop the colder air, trapping pollutants at ground level. It coincides with extra sources of microscopic grit: small fires for cooking and warmth, smoke from Diwali firecrackers and farmers’ burning stubble from their fields after the harvest.
Ms. Atishi, the Delhi chief minister, has traded accusations with the party led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi over the burning of crop waste. Her smaller party controls the state of Punjab, which is most often blamed for the fires. But the surrounding states run by Mr. Modi’s party, she said, were responsible for much more of this season’s burning.
The scientific community is at odds over what proportion of the deadliest particulate matter comes from the fields. Recent analysis by the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology put stubble burning’s contribution at just over 1 percent in October. By this month it had risen, to 13 percent, but remained small in comparison to the city’s base-line pollution from vehicles and other sources.
Whatever the causes of the smog, by one ranking Delhi was not just the most polluted city in the world, but “nearly five times as bad as the second most polluted city, Dhaka,” in Bangladesh next door, as Shashi Tharoor, a leader of the opposition in Parliament and best-selling author, posted on X.
“This city is essentially uninhabitable from November to January inclusive and barely livable the rest of the year. Should it even remain the nation’s capital?” he wrote.
About 10 years after Delhi’s extraordinary wintertime air pollution first drew the world’s attention, it is remarkable how little is understood about it. Even its health effects need further research.
Dr. Salvi, of the Indian Chest Society, said there were simply no significant longitudinal studies on cardiovascular function, which are “expensive, and take 10 years to do.”
He said that “I can only imagine that the prevalence of heart attacks, of strokes, of heart failure — they must all increase significantly because of this high level of air pollution. But there are no studies from India to support it.”
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