Living in Delhi’s smog is already hell and if India doesn’t act it will only get worse – especially for the poorest

The alarm clock goes off in the morning – what’s the first thing you do? The answer for me, in the 10 days since Diwali in Delhi, has been to check the reading on the air purifier in my bedroom.

The arrival of what is now dubbed the “pollution season” in India’s capital (it used to just be called winter) has led to alarming scenes of familiar touristic landscapes shrouded in grey smog.

Sunday was particularly bad, with the city’s air quality index (AQI) crossing an all-time high of 1,000 in some places. For context, the AQI level considered safe by the WHO is 0-50. There were some concerned reports back in Britain this week about Bonfire Night leading to a spike of 80 in London.

I have been inundated this week with messages from other parts of the world, friends, colleagues and relatives wondering how I’m coping in what is right now the most polluted major city on Earth.

The reality of living with such extreme air pollution, like almost any other external hazard, depends entirely on a person’s financial means to cope with it.

For myself, pollution season is more of an inconvenience than a threat to life, albeit a considerable one. After chasing down and taping up any elusive cracks in windows and under doors, air purifiers are effective at maintaining a relatively breathable environment indoors.

It makes exercising outdoors impossible, and even when stepping out with a face mask on to go to work, the shops, a friend’s home, you are hit by the acrid smell and stinging eyes associated with high levels of fine particulate matter in the air. Better just to stay inside.

We know from experience that the pollution is here to stay, at least until late February. So days when weather conditions see a dip – the AQI today was a passable 180, for instance – have to be seized upon as an opportunity to get some “fresh” air.

However, despite a Delhi government scheme to start handing out masks to school children, face coverings with high-quality filtration remain out of reach to most of the city’s workers, never mind more expensive equipment like purifiers. A decent mask costs around £20 – for comparison, the government is only now considering a raise in the minimum wage for unskilled labourers to £160 a month.

Just going about the city it is clear that the adoption of masks is more commonplace than it was last year, and the matter of air pollution is getting considerably greater media and government attention.

Still, even on the very worst days for smog, it is also easy to see labourers, watchmen, street cleaners, rickshaw drivers and worst of all, homeless beggars, spending all day exposed to deadly levels of pollution without any form of protection.

Working class women are arguably among the worst-affected victims of the crisis, expected to go out and do errands in the smog during the day and then cook using dirty, solid fuels in kitchens at home, says Santosh Harish, a fellow specialising in environment policy at the major think tank Centre for Policy Research.

It’s not just a matter of impacts on health, either. The smog led to schools across the city being forced to close this week. One institution that boasted on Facebook of still being open? The elite American Embassy School, which has industrial-scale air purifiers across its campus.

“There is no doubt that the poor are disproportionately exposed,” says Harish. “Pollution is a risk factor that often sits on top of other risk factors – and the inability to access good healthcare and so on [affecting poorer people], if you combine that with exposure to air pollution the impacts are going to be worse.”

What’s really scary in Delhi’s case is that the broad mixture of local and regional factors contributing to the toxic mix – yes, crop burning in neighbouring states, but also dirty coal power plants, construction work, factories, transport and domestic fuel burning – allow the various devolved governments to blame each other and avoid taking serious action.

India is already arguably the most polluted country in the world, home to 14 of the 20 most polluted cities. It has overtaken China in that respect, despite still only having a third of that country’s GDP per person.

If India continues to grow its economy, even accepting the current blip it is experiencing in that regard, it is very likely that this will lead to greater air pollution unless there is a major intervention to prevent this happening.

It has to come from the top. That means Narendra Modi himself – or (such is the way India works today) it won’t be followed through.

From enforcing emissions standards at coal power plants to recalibrating metropolises to prioritise mass transit, or simply empowering existing pollution control boards to do their jobs properly, there is plenty the Modi administration could be doing.

Because as things stand, for three months of the year Delhi has become an unfair, toxic and indeed deadly nightmare, and it is only going to get worse if nobody does something serious about it.