Losing the plot: On North India’s air quality issue

On November 24, the Delhi government confronted a small and peaceful crowd near India Gate, that had gathered to express its concern about the city’s air quality index hovering near 400, with a heavy police presence. The question practically wrote itself: was the threat being managed here public safety or political embarrassment? Air quality in North India in winter is often discussed as a Delhi issue, yet monitoring stations have revealed a continuous zone of foul air from around Islamabad to Bihar. Emissions from industry, power generation, transport and agriculture circulate in this shared airshed. This is why the India Gate protests are politically significant. Delhi’s middle class has usually responded with air purifiers, closed windows, vacations and private dissatisfaction — but apparently not anymore. And the state has responded by policing rather than engagement. Deploying Rapid Action Force units shows that the government treats these gatherings as a law-and-order rather than a governance problem. North India’s winter smog is the most visible part of a wider national crisis. Long-term analyses of particulate pollution, such as the Air Quality Life Index, have shown that unsafe air is now the norm for most of India — and that present regulation, monitoring, and enforcement arrangements are insufficient across States and sectors. Treating the problem as a seasonal emergency, in the face of evidence pointing to a permanent condition demanding permanent institutions, has encouraged only bursts of action. The airshed is the primary unit of governance.

Today, authority is split among central ministries, State departments, municipal bodies and specialised regulators, each with partial jurisdiction and mixed incentives. The Commission for Air Quality Management was created to address this fragmentation and is empowered to direct emissions control, coordinate among States and agencies, and impose sanctions. Yet, its interventions have not matched the scale or persistence of the problem. Its task now is to use its mandate to require time-bound sectoral plans from governments and major emitters, track compliance through continuous monitoring, and ensure data is in public. Governments should also abandon technical quick fixes. These measures consume public funds and administrative bandwidth while leaving the main sources of emissions intact. The focus should be on interventions in power, industry, transport, construction and agriculture, with tighter norms and real enforcement, time-bound retirement or retrofitting of polluting plants, support for cleaner fuels and technologies and credible alternatives for farmers burning crop residue. These solutions will take time to manifest but only they will lead to lasting changes. And they need to be backed by a courageous political vision rather than heavy-handedness.