Hannah Ellis-Petersen
As winter sets in across north India – usually around the time of the country’s biggest festival, Diwali – the air in Delhi becomes thick and brown with visible pollutants. To breathe in is to taste toxic fumes. The visibility is often so bad that famous monuments are reduced to smoky blurs on the horizon. It is, as one writer once put it, as if a burial shroud has cloaked the city.
For a decade, Delhi has regularly held the dishonourable title of being the world’s most polluted city, with other Indian cities close behind. A recent study calculated that the 30 million people living in and around the capital could have almost 12 years taken off their lives due to its catastrophic health impacts.
“The air is killing us all,” said Hartosh Singh, in between deep rasping coughs, as he pushed his fruit cart through Delhi’s busy Bhogal market. “The government is leaving us to die so that India can grow big. Every year more cars, more buildings, more rubbish, more factories, filling the air with filth – is that worth more than our lives?”
Recently, Delhi’s air quality index (AQI) – which indicates the level of pollutants in the air – went as high as 1,700 in some parts of the city. At the worst point of Beijing’s pollution crisis, the highest the AQI reached was 1,300. The maximum index deemed healthy by the World Health Organization is 50.
Much of the blame for the pollution is directed at farmers who, due to a change in legislation in 2009, have only a short turnaround 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 over into Delhi, where, due to the meteorological conditions, it often hangs over the city in a thick cloud.
