‘I can’t breathe in this city’: inaction over Delhi’s suffocating pollution sparks rare protest

As a familiar smoky evening haze gathered over Delhi, the crowd began to assemble in their hundreds. Mothers and children, students, retirees and environmentalists were all united by a basic but desperate demand: the right to breathe safely in India’s capital.
“Delhi is not a liveable city any more, it’s a death trap,” said Radhika Aggarwal, 33, an engineer who joined the protest on Sunday.
“As I stand here, I’m breathing air that I know is killing me. But we see nothing but a failure by the government to do anything to stop this and clean up the pollution. No policies, no real action. So I’m here to fight for my city.”
For the past decade, Delhi has held the inglorious title of being the world’s most polluted city. Pollution season has become as normalised as the monsoon, as it rolls over the city in a suffocating smog that begins in October and can last for more than four months.
In the past weeks, Air quality index (AQI) measurements have regularly soared to more than a hundred times higher than is deemed safe by global heath bodies and residents routinely describe the city as akin to a gas chamber. Pollution now kills more people in Delhi than obesity or diabetes.

The seeming inevitability of the pollution, and the failure by successive state governments to do anything about it, means it has often been met with apathy by residents. But on Sunday, as a rare protest against the increasingly woeful air quality erupted in the Delhi’s political centre, anger and frustration were rife.
The call for Sunday’s protest had been to gather at India Gate, the country’s famed memorial to its fallen martyrs. But in the days prior to the protest, the police had made hundreds of calls and homes visits to those amplifying the protest to pressure them to call it off, even threatening legal action against them; the latest crackdown on any form of dissent in India.
Saurav Das, 26, was among those who received police pressure, after he put out a call for action against pollution on social media. Though young and fit, he had recently been diagnosed with allergic bronchitis, due to the filthy air.
“We wanted to gather peacefully at India Gate to send a message, loud and clear, that people are fed by failed policies and government apathy that have failed to combat air pollution,” said Das. “Instead we were met with unnecessary brute force.”
On Sunday police shut down India gate to prevent the protest and within hours, officers had aggressively cleared the nearby site, detaining almost 100 protesters at police stations until late into the night, with elderly people, mothers and children among them. The next day, a police case was filed against the organisers.
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The reasons the capital is left to choke every winter are well documented; a lethal mix of emissions from tens of millions of cars, fires set by farmers in neighbouring states, plants that burn the city’s waste, coal fired power plants and smaller fires set by people just to keep warm. The cold weather, and lack of winds and rain, ensures the smog smothers Delhi and much of north India.
Yet state and national government policies to tackle the root causes remain largely absent. Instead, those who can, seal themselves indoors with expensive air purifiers or escape to the mountains and beaches of other states, turning clean air into Delhi’s most luxury commodity – one unaffordable to most the of the city’s 30 million residents.
On Sunday, much of the protester’s ire was directed at the Delhi government. In February, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which also runs the national government under prime minister Narendra Modi, won the Delhi state elections, stirring hope among residents it might finally trigger substantive anti-pollution policies at both state and national level.
Instead, the new BJP state government not only went to courts to allow “green” fireworks to be allowed during Diwali celebrations – contributing to one of the city’s most polluted festival seasons in years – but has also been accused by opponents of attempting to fudge the city’s pollution data, either by halting reports from the city’s air quality monitoring centres or by spraying water on the air pollution monitors to bring the numbers down. The BJP denied tampering with pollution figures and called the accusation “politically motivated”, blaming the previous government for the ongoing pollution problem.
The BJP’s multimillion rupee cloud seeding experiment – an attempt to make it rain using chemicals, in order to bring down pollution levels – proved a failure.
“I can’t breathe in this city any more, I can’t take a walk without getting a terrible headache,” said Sofie, 33. “It feels like there aren’t enough masks in the world to make this air breathable.”
Many among those gathered at the protest were mothers accompanied their children and signs were held aloft with messages such as “breathing is killing me”. The nearby central secretariat and parliament buildings had been rendered almost invisible by the evening’s opaque brown smog as the city’s AQI touched 500 – the healthy level is 50.
“Any other city breathing this air would have declared a health emergency by now,” said Gopesh Singh, 58. “How many more millions of people have to die for the government to act?”