New Delhi, Nov. 25 -- Delhi's winters were once a civic pleasure-crisp air, long afternoons in the sun and the seasonal abundance of fruit, vegetables and conviviality. Today, it is a season of avoidance. Those who can afford it escape; those who cannot barricade themselves indoors behind purifiers and masks. Still poorer struggle through. A city that once revelled in winter now merely endures it.
The sources of Delhi's seasonal smog are by now drearily familiar: construction dust, tailpipe emissions, industrial effluent, regional crop-burning and the city's misfortune of sitting in a geographic basin where cold air traps pollutants close to the surface. Equally predictable are the coping mechanisms-air purifiers, retrofitted windows, N95 masks- an indirect tax private citizens are paying for the state's failures. Governments, in turn, wheel out the annual theatre of GRAP stages, school closures and odd-even announcements. They educate us with jargon. All promise urgency; none alters the trajectory.
What Delhi lacks is not knowledge but resolve. After decades of accumulated neglect-built on rising population, rising prosperity and the perverse comfort of incremental policymaking-its air cannot be cleaned with technocratic tinkering or atmospheric gimmicks rain which was most natural in its silliness. The problem has long outgrown cosmetic fixes.
For starters, construction, one of the most manageable sources of dust, needs uncompromising regulation. A seasonal halt-common in colder countries-is an obvious start. For the remaining months, sites must be sealed, equipped with water-sprinkling systems and fitted with inexpensive, SIM-enabled air-quality monitors that upload data in real time. We already automate traffic fines with similar technology; enforcing pollution controls is no harder except politically.
Vehicles, however, are the decisive battleground. Delhi cannot breathe easier without a rapid, mandatory shift to BS-VI engines, which drastically cut nitrogen oxides and particulate emissions. These standards have been routine in richer economies for years; India's belated adoption has been half-hearted and poorly enforced. The capital must move beyond token compliance and treat BS-VI as the bare minimum-not a technical upgrade but a public-health necessity.
Such a shift will demand simultaneous pressure on two powerful lobbies. Automakers must upgrade hardware-ECUs, catalytic converters and OBD-II systems-to global norms rather than low-cost approximations. Fuel suppliers, especially state-owned refiners, must scale up the production of low-sulphur petrol and diesel that BS-VI engines require. Without cleaner fuel, cleaner vehicles are a fiction.
But technology alone will not suffice. As Singapore and London have demonstrated, the economics of owning an internal-combustion engine must be reshaped. Road taxes, congestion charges and parking fees for ICE vehicles in central Delhi should be raised sharply; EVs given preferential access; and diesel cars treated as the costly externalities they are. If Delhi means to reduce pollution, it must make polluting inconvenient.
Industrial emissions must be monitored through continuous, tamper-proof systems, with non-compliant factories shut rather than warned. Waste burning-still common in markets and by municipal workers-should bring steep penalties that are actually enforced.
The thorniest problem lies outside Delhi: crop burning in neighbouring states. Fines alone have failed. Compliance has to be perhaps more induced than extracted from the politically sensitive constituency of farmers. A mix of satellite monitoring, MSP-linked incentives and subsidies for machines like Happy Seeders and balers is required. If necessary, districts that repeatedly violate norms should face cuts in central allocations. Delhi cannot clean its air unless the regions upwind stop lighting fires.
Land is not Delhi's constraint; imagination is. Unused public plots, instead of being earmarked for speculative development, should host dense Miyawaki forests-fast-growing thickets of native species that serve as urban lungs. Green buffers around industrial clusters and major roads should be restored, not sacrificed. The greed of the land owning Bodies - DDA, MCD, Railways, Central and State Government has to be halted by an act so that further populating of Delhi is halted. The city must confront its scale. Delhi has exceeded its ecological carrying capacity. If reversing migration is unrealistic, halting further densification is not. A freeze on new large construction, a redirection of industry to other northern states and stricter limits on heavy vehicles entering the city are overdue.
These measures will raise costs. They will be inflationary. Construction will slow; vehicles will become more expensive; enforcement will require investment. But to allow things to drift the way they are is vastly more expensive. Each winter extracts a silent levy: hospitalisations, lost productivity, construction stoppages, pollution-related cardiovascular and neurological damage and a long-term deterioration in human capital that India can ill afford. Delhi's pollution crisis is no longer an environmental problem. It is a macroeconomic threat disguised as weather.
Delhi sits atop an invisible, slow-moving catastrophe. Its causes are known. Its solutions are unremarkable. What is missing is political courage: to enforce BS-VI without exception, to price pollution honestly, to confront lobbies that prefer the status quo and to acknowledge that prosperity without breath is not prosperity at all.
Without such resolve, the capital will continue to choke-not only on its air, but on its own complacency.
Views expressed are personal. The writer is an Ex-IPS officer, and he writes regularly on policy and economy
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from Millennium Post.