Schools were closed, vehicle entry restricted and India’s top court on Monday advised residents of Delhi’s metropolitan area to wear masks as the capital city was shrouded in “severe plus” levels of air pollution for the second day in a row. For the past week, Delhi’s air pollution has been in the “severe” category – dashing government claims that improved surveillance of rural crop burning and other measures to ease the annual pollution emergency are working.

On Monday the PM2.5 air pollution levels – particles so small that they can be inhaled deep into the lungs and even into the bloodstream – were nearly 17 times the limit set by the World Health Organization (WHO). WHO limits for PM2.5 over a 24-hour time period is 25 micrograms per cubic meter of air (μg/m3), while some monitors in Delhi measured PM2.5 levels at 420 μg/m3.

Air pollution is a year-long problem in Delhi, but the halt of monsoons in the autumn as well as low wind speeds – what the government calls “unfavourable meteorological conditions” – have long sent toxic levels of air pollution soaring in the late autumn.

And the burning of rice stubble in surrounding rural states such as Haryana and Punjab continue to exacerbate conditions, said Delhi’s chief minister Atishi Marlena during a press interaction. The problem became much worse ever since 2008, when the national government ordered farmers to delay the planting of rice crops until later in the spring – thus delaying the harvest date and leaving farmers in a rush to plant a crop of winter wheat.

Farmers avoiding surveillance satellites

While state governments claim to have clamped down on farmers who set their fields on fire to clear the paddy stubble, stepping up surveillance and fines, satellite images reveal something else.

To avoid being detected, farmers are merely setting the stubble on fire later in the afternoon, after the satellite that the government uses for surveillance information passes, experts told Health Policy Watch. To improve enforcement, stationary satellites should be used instead, they said.

See related story: Delhi Air Pollution: Is Government’s Satellite Monitoring Missing Stubble Fires?

Aarti Khosla, Director of Delhi-based research consultancy Climate Trends said that rather than blaming only the rural areas, Delhi officials need to better manage the city’s background air pollution levels year-round.

“Agricultural farm burning, contributes, on the days when it’s a peak, to 40% of Delhi’s air [poor] quality,” she said at a press conference on the sidelines of UN climate conference (COP29) in Baku. “And when, when it’s not a peak, it’s 2-3% of its problem.”

Short-term measures

Along with the advise about masking, the government has ordered most schools to hold classes online, barring a few exceptions.

Vehicles that do not meet pollution norms will not be allowed into the city. All construction activities have been halted given their contribution to increasing dust.

Options to allow government employees to work from home or call in a reduced number of employees to the workplace are also being considered. The government has already deployed vehicles that are spraying mist on the streets and the trees nearby to reduce the dust.

Experts though have been pointing out that such measures are short-term and will do little to reduce the city’s toxic levels of air pollution, or the autumn emergency that recurs annually.

Air pollution is the biggest threat to health today & is not limited to a city, state or country. Needs a science-based approach with actions in multiple sectors – transport, construction, factories, cooking fuel, agriculture etc. We can solve the problem, other countries have.

— Soumya Swaminathan (@doctorsoumya) November 18, 2024

‘We want pollution levels to be down year-round’ 

“Ultimately, we want the pollution levels to be down year round and not just the extremes or winters,” Sarath Guttikunda, director of the Delhi-based Urban Emissions.Info that monitors and researches air pollution research, told Health Policy Watch, in an emailed comment.

“Five items which need a long-term vision,” he added, “aggressive expansion and promotion of use of mass transport (especially buses), walking, and cycling modes; promotion of clean fuels like electricity or gas for heating during the winter months; strict enforcement of a ban on open waste burning; clear mandates for complying with emission norms for all industries including brick kilns; and management of road dust,” he said.

He also said that the promotion of green spaces adds to a city’s air quality and ‘breathability’.

In rural areas, officials have long spoken about promoting alternatives to rice-stubble burning, such as machine crushing of stubble and expedited composting formulas. But these, too, have not been backed with sufficient levels of state or national government incentives – or enforcement for those who continue to burn.

Shifting government subsidies away from rice production to support the cultivation of more nutritionally rich, indigenous grains, such as millet, has also been advocated by environmentalists to reduce stubble. They point out that the rice is now largely produced for export and is a heavy consumer of water, draining underground aquifers. However, the rural farm lobby in Punjab and Haryana is a powerful force and politicians have been generally fearful about changing the status quo.

Impacts on climate and health

The Southeast Asia region typically suffers from the highest pollution levels in the world, with an estimated 2 million deaths annually, according to WHO.

And the annual pollution emergencies that strike at Delhi, in fact affect the shared  airshed of a much larger area – the sprawling Indo-Gangetic Plains and Himalayan Foothills region extending from eastern Pakistan, where crop-stubble burning also is widespread, across northern India and Nepal to Bangladesh.

That has led to groups such as the World Bank to call for a broader, regional approach to air quality management. But so far attempts to trigger political cooperation across fraught borders have engaged scientists, but not always top political leaders.

Reducing air pollution also reduces climate change – a “triple win” for health, climate and economic development, experts have maintained.

Fossil fuel burning is directly responsible for a significant proportion of air pollution related deaths, so shifting to renewables has synergistic effects, noted Marina Romanello in the 30 October launch of the Lancet Countdown on Climate and Health. 

In addition, methane waste emissions and black carbon particles emitted by open crops, waste burning and household fuels are short-lived climate pollutants that exacerbate snow melt and warming temperatures.

Speaking from Baku’s COP29, WHO’s Director for Environment and Climate Change Dr Maria Neira, too, drew attention to Delhi’s staggering levels of air pollution during a press conference.

“The same causes that are responsible for global warming, the combustion of fossil fuels,… are the causes of air pollution as well,” she said. “At the moment we are talking here, people in one place in the world are breathing air with 400 micrograms/ per cubic meter of pm.2.5,” she said, displaying a WHO ‘BreatheLife’ gauge that reflects how Delhi’s annual air pollution levels exceed WHO guideline norms more than 12 fold.

The acutely high air pollution levels are a long-term term risk for health, with one-quarter to one-third of deaths from hypertension and other cardiovascular diseases, lung disease as well as lung cancer attributable to air pollution.

But they are also a very immediate health emergency, said Dr Courtney Howard, vice-chair of the Global Climate and Health Alliance (GCHA), at the same COP press briefing.

“So when air pollution levels are as high as they are in Delhi today, what we’ll be presenting to emergency departments are people with breathing problems from asthma, from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. People will be coming in with chest pain due to heart attacks that get worse. Strokes are made worse by high levels of air pollution on a more chronic basis. It does increase risks to newborns,” said Howard.

Image Credits: Chetan Bhattacharji, AQI, IQAir, Our World in Data, NASA, WHO.