Air pollution in Delhi has reached a critical and almost irreversible stage, turning the city into one of the most polluted capitals in the world and posing a serious threat to public health and environmental sustainability. For a significant part of the year, especially during winter, the air becomes a toxic mix of PM 2.5 and PM 10, vehicular emissions, industrial pollutants, construction dust, and smoke from biomass and stubble burning, often pushing the Air Quality Index into the “severe” category.
Dense smog reduces visibility, disrupts daily life, and leads to a sharp rise in respiratory and cardiovascular illnesses, particularly among children, the elderly, and outdoor workers. I wish to record my deep grievance over the chronic and almost normalized failure of India’s air-pollution governance, where responsibility has been systematically avoided by scientists, politicians, institutions, and society together. Scientific data produced for agencies like the Central Pollution Control Board accumulated year after year, but without moral pressure or unified scientific resistance, it failed to translate into enforceable action. Politically, pollution persists because it is a slow killer without immediate electoral consequences.
Accountability is diluted through blame-shifting between central and state governments, seasonal excuses, and symbolic emergency measures that vanish once winter ends. Though regulatory agencies issue notices, they rarely translate into closures, penalties, or long-term deterrence, especially against powerful industrial and infrastructural violators. This air pollution is treated as an episodic inconvenience and invoked loudly during winter smog or court interventions and quietly ignored when elections, economic optics, or corporate interests take precedence. Successive governments publicly endorse clean-air targets while simultaneously diluting enforcement, extending compliance deadlines, and prioritizing short-term growth narratives over the right to breathe clean air.
Worse still, corruption is not an aberration but an enabling mechanism ~ inspectors vulnerable to pressure or inducement, data manipulation to underreport emissions, and selective enforcement that spares influential polluters while penalizing small, visible actors ~ creating an ecosystem where non-compliance is cheaper than compliance. Nepotism and patronage further corrode the system, as appointments, transfers, and regulatory decisions are influenced by political proximity rather than expertise or integrity, hollowing out agencies that should be science-driven and autonomous.
Even ministries tasked with stewardship, such as the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, appear constrained by inter-ministerial politics and industrial lobbies, resulting in fragmented policies that lack accountability, transparency, and measurable outcomes. In addition to these, I want to strongly highlight the deeply flawed approach in which the government spends huge public funds every winter to procure and install pollution-monitoring gadgets, sprinklers, smog towers, mobile vans, and emergency-response equipment, while conspicuously failing to design or implement any serious year-round programme to control air pollution at its source.
This seasonal, optics-driven strategy reduces governance to spectacle: equipment is hurriedly showcased when AQI levels spike and media pressure mounts, only to be forgotten once winter passes, even though emissions from industries, construction, transport, waste burning, and power generation continue unabated throughout the year. Under national frameworks like the National Clean Air Programme, targets are announced but accountability is missing, funding is skewed toward short-term technological fixes rather than sustained regulatory action, and structural reforms – such as strict industrial audits, continuous emission penalties, urban planning corrections, and public transport expansion – are indefinitely postponed.
This pattern reflects a deeper political failure, where the Government of India appears willing to finance visible winter-time interventions that generate headlines, but unwilling to confront powerful polluters or invest consistently in preventive measures that may be politically inconvenient. As a result, public money is repeatedly spent on treating symptoms during a few months of crisis instead of curing the disease through continuous, science-based governance, leaving citizens trapped in an annual cycle of emergency, expenditure, and abandonment, with clean air promised every winter and denied for the rest of the year. In my opinion, control of air pollution in Delhi will never be truly effective unless strategies are framed around the geographical reality of the region, its adverse meteorological conditions, and the actual distribution of pollution sources, with a strong emphasis on preventive, ground-level action.
Delhi’s landlocked location in the Indo-Gangetic Plain, weak wind circulation, frequent temperature inversion, and high winter humidity trap pollutants for long durations, making the city a permanent receptor of both local and regional emissions. Under such conditions, merely organizing seminars, conferences, or laboratory-based research by scientists within pollution control boards, choosing academic safety over public confrontation, may allow pollution to become a research subject rather than a civil-rights emergency but cannot by itself deliver cleaner air. It demands coordinated field action, strict enforcement on roads, construction sites, industries, landfills, and agricultural regions, along with sustained public awareness so that citizens become active participants rather than passive sufferers.
Equally essential is strong political will to take scientifically guided but often unpopular decisions, instead of relying on short-term announcements and media-driven publicity that highlight political visibility rather than real outcomes. It is pertinent to mention here that PM2.5 can be generated within an already polluted atmosphere, and in my view this secondary formation is one of the most underestimated reasons for persistently high pollution levels in cities like Delhi. Even when direct emissions are reduced, polluted air rich in precursor gases such as sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, ammonia, and volatile organic compounds can chemically react in the atmosphere to form new fine particulate matter.
Under conditions common to Delhi ~ high humidity, low wind speed, fog, and temperature inversion – these gases undergo complex photochemical and aqueous-phase reactions, producing secondary PM2.5 such as sulfates, nitrates, and organic aerosols. In such stagnant conditions, pollution effectively “self-generates,” meaning the atmosphere itself becomes a factory for fine particles rather than just a carrier of emissions. This explains why PM2.5 levels often remain critical even when visible sources appear limited or temporarily controlled. This PM2.5 formed within a polluted atmosphere (secondary PM2.5) is often more harmful, or at least equally harmful, than PM2.5 emitted directly from point sources. Secondary PM2.5 is rich in sulfates, nitrates, ammonium, and secondary organic aerosols, which are often more acidic and oxidative.
These particles can trigger stronger inflammatory and oxidative stress responses in the lungs and bloodstream. It is important to note that during the Covid-19 lockdown, when most transport systems and industries were shut down, AQI levels in Delhi often remained high, which clearly demonstrates that air pollution is not controlled by emission sources alone. Secondary formation tends to produce ultrafine and highly hygroscopic particles that grow in humid air, allowing them to penetrate deep into the alveoli and even enter the bloodstream, and in some respects, it can be more dangerous.
Therefore, focusing only on direct emission sources without reducing precursor gases and unfavourable atmospheric conditions fails to address this hidden but powerful mechanism of pollution build-up, reinforcing the need for preventive, year-round control strategies. In my view, unless pollution control strategies are designed around Delhi’s geographical disadvantage and meteorological reality, and focus on permanently lowering baseline emissions rather than reacting after pollution peaks, clean air will continue to remain an unfulfilled promise despite repeated emergency measures.
(The writer is a former Senior Scientist, Central Pollution Control Board)