Indias capital contemplates new lockdown this time for pollution instead of covid

NEW DELHI â€" Shikha Nikhil’s two teenage boys spent much of the past 18 months cooped up in their home in the outskirts of India’s capital. Normal life resumed only in September, when covid-19 cases subsided and their school reopened.

Their freedom didn’t last, their mother said. This week, Raghav is again locked at home, unable to attend school or play outdoors. Krishna is again wheezing and huddled next to a vapor machine to ease his labored breathing.

The pandemic hasn’t returned â€" New Delhi’s notorious air pollution has.

As a thick, toxic haze envelops northern India, officials in Delhi this week shut schools, closed government offices and ordered a halt to construction projects, adopting measures reminiscent of the pandemic. With measurements of harmful airborne particles hovering at 20 times the safe limit recommended by the World Health Organization, Delhi officials said Monday they’ve drawn up plans to redeploy another familiar strategy: a full lockdown of the capital.

Coming a few months after shoppers, students and workers began to gingerly venture outdoors following a deadly covid wave this spring, Delhi’s response to its air crisis and talk of a renewed lockdown are shattering any sense of normalcy that was gradually settling over this region of 17 million residents.

“They were so happy to be back in school in October after almost two years, and now they’re back home,” Nikhil said about her two boys, who she worries are struggling to focus on upcoming standardized exams as they bounce in and out of the classroom.

“There’s no stability, no sanity,” Nikhil said. “First it was covid, and now it’s pollution. There is no end to it. But how can you expose your kids to that air? You choke, you literally choke.”

While Delhi citizens fumed in recent days about the air quality, the issue has been litigated in the country’s Supreme Court, where judges grilled Delhi officials about their plans to solve what was approaching a full-fledged emergency.

At a closely watched hearing this weekend, one judge complained that people had to wear masks at home. Delhi’s air was indeed so poor, a lawyer representing the city government told the bench, that breathing it for a day was equivalent to smoking 20 cigarettes.

By Monday, Delhi officials announced they had drafted a plan to lock down the city for a few days â€" a measure that had never been implemented until the covid-19 outbreak last year.

It’s not clear if or when city officials would make such a move. Arvind Kejriwal, Delhi’s top elected leader, called a lockdown an “extreme” step, but one he would take if he had backing from the leaders of neighboring regions and branches of the central government.

Air pollution has been a perennial problem every winter across northern India, where factors including cold temperatures, low wind speeds, the setting of fireworks during the Diwali festival and crop-burning in states like Punjab combine to form a noxious, gray soup that gathers easily over the densely populated Gangetic plain but is much slower to dissipate.

Air quality was markedly better last year, as economic activity slowed amid the pandemic. This year, experts warned that the pollution would be exacerbated by the abnormally long monsoon season, which forced farmers to burn their stubble in a shortened window after the Diwali festival, which took place on Nov. 4.

Up to 40 percent of the air particulate matter in Delhi this year is due to stubble burning in the northern agricultural heartland, said Gufran Beig, a prominent meteorologist who heads an air quality forecasting service under the Ministry of Earth Science. Just this week, there are about 3,000 farm fires burning in northern India as growers clear their fields for new crops, Beig said, citing satellite imagery.

Another 40 percent comes from vehicular traffic, particularly large diesel trucks rumbling along Delhi’s roads, he added.

Beig, whose team gives frequent advice to Delhi and central government officials, said he did not want to comment on policy prescriptions. But he believed a brief lockdown would dramatically help pollution levels â€" at an economic cost.

“Look, there’s no doubt because we’ve seen it before,” he said. “During the 2020 lockdown that there was drastic decline in air pollution. The question is, other than health, what other factors have to be considered?”

So far, Delhi officials have tried to tackle the problem with smaller, less extreme steps. Delhiites have been asked to turn off their car engines at red lights and not use portable diesel generators. Farmers in the region have been given a liquid decomposer to spray on their fields to break down stubble into organic fertilizer instead of burning, although the program is still considered in its trial phase. City officials have touted several new smog towers â€" building-sized installations with large fans and filters set up in dense shopping districts â€" with unclear results.

So far, nothing has made a meaningful dent.

“There is no comprehensive strategy, no comprehensive plan,” said Jai Dhar Gupta, an entrepreneur and former member of the Delhi government’s air pollution think tank. Gupta said he reluctantly supports returning to a brief lockdown despite the “emotional and psychic costs.”

“But it’s not showing leadership to say we’re going into lockdown, it’s incompetence,” he said. “This is a man-made problem. This is not covid, which we didn’t understand.”

Gupta, who heads the Delhi citizens group My Right to Breathe, said he has been spending recent weeks campaigning to raise awareness about some of the lesser-known but significant contributors to pollution, such as the urban poor burning wood and dung for heating and cooking.

“The only way to bring change to India is for the problem to become big enough that it becomes a vote bank issue,” he said.

Ritu Gupta, a Delhi native who is not related to Jai Dhar Gupta, said the winter air has always been bad since she grew up in the 1980s. But this past week was the first time she came down with bronchitis, itchy nose and eyes, and had to take antibiotics and antihistamines and breathe out of a nebulizer.

The air quality was clean and crisp last winter, Gupta recalled. Earlier this year, she was looking forward to walking through South Delhi’s lush parks when the sweltering humidity relents and a chill settles over the city. Her son looked forward to playing more cricket, her daughter badminton.

But no such luck.

“We were all looking forward to getting out of the house more,” Gupta said. “That’s what’s troublesome. Things should be improving, not deteriorating.”

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