The Republic of Smog: Why Delhi Still Chokes as India Looks Away
India Gate protests in New Delhi against air pollution crisis. (Image Aryan on X)
Delhi is trapped in an iron triangle of bad geography, bad governance, and bad incentives—a triad that feeds on political half-measures, bureaucratic comfort, and judicial firefighting.
By P SESH KUMAR
New Delhi, November 18, 2025 — Every winter, Delhi becomes a slow, coughing republic unto itself. Long before the sun rises, a brown-grey sheet seals the sky, the jaundiced streetlights glow like tired candles, and eight-year-olds walk to school wearing masks that look less like pandemic shields and more like survival gear.
Newspapers carry familiar photographs—Yamuna Bank shrouded in a toxic haze, India Gate disappearing into a smoky mirage, the airport struggling to land aircraft in visibility measured in metres. Television studios erupt. Ministers exchange insults. Activists scream into microphones.
The Supreme Court demands affidavits, action plans, explanations. And then—like clockwork—the city endures, adjusts, forgets, and waits for next October when the theatre will begin again.
Delhi’s smog is not an annual accident. It did not arrive in a single year, nor is it the result of a single villain striking matches in faraway farms.
The city is trapped in an iron triangle of bad geography, bad governance, and bad incentives—a triad that feeds on political half-measures, bureaucratic comfort, and judicial firefighting. When the winter inversion settles over the Indo-Gangetic basin, Delhi becomes a bowl with a lid; the air cannot rise, the pollutants cannot escape, and every tailpipe, chimney, trash heap and burning field contributes to what residents breathe minute by minute.
For the longest time, the public debate has been little more than an annual shouting match between Delhi, Punjab, Haryana, and the Centre. It is a theatre of blame that thrives on half-truths.
Yes, stubble burning does send violent bursts of smoke into Delhi’s skies each October–November. Some days, it can account for a third or more of the city’s particulate load. But those are spikes, not the baseline. The reason Delhi suffocates even in December, January, and sometimes February-long after farm fires have died-is because the city itself is a giant emissions factory.
Vehicles crowd every corridor. Congested roads spit out dust that rains back down. Construction sites operate with the enthusiasm of a gold rush and the discipline of a street circus.
Diesel generators hum behind malls, hospitals, and residential towers. Municipal landfills burn quietly at night, feeding the dark sky a steady diet of poison.
Delhi’s government did not create all of this. But it has certainly perfected the art of managing perceptions rather than pollutants. The odd–even rationing scheme, for instance, returns every few years like a festival of self-congratulation. It makes for dramatic visuals—empty roads, traffic marshals, disciplined queues—but its impact lasts as long as a light drizzle on a forest fire.
Smog towers, proudly inaugurated with ribbon-cuttings and speeches, became instant metaphors for the governing style: expensive, photogenic, symbolic-and scientifically meaningless beyond a tiny radius. Cloud seeding promised artificial rain to wash away particles, but meteorologists quietly muttered that Delhi’s winter atmosphere is too dry to make that fantasy work. And the city’s pollution control committee still struggles to build consistent scientific expertise or maintain uninterrupted air-monitoring networks.
Yet Delhi is no sovereign island. The city’s statutory powers are a fraction of the problem it is expected to fix. Land, police, major roadways, and the Delhi Development Authority sit with the Union government. The Commission for Air Quality Management (CAQM), a supposedly all-powerful statutory regulator covering the entire NCR, remains strangely gentle-heavy on advisories, light on enforcement.
It can ban construction or halt trucks, but it cannot tell Punjab what to grow, cannot order Haryana to enforce residue burning penalties, and cannot push Uttar Pradesh to shift polluting industries away from the NCR belt. CAQM is a giant with tied hands; it roars on paper and whispers in practice.
Then comes the third actor in this winter drama—the Supreme Court of India. For nearly four decades the Court has been Delhi’s emergency oxygen mask. It ordered the city’s buses to switch to CNG, nudged the shutdown of filthy power plants, and forced governments to confront the environmental disaster they preferred to ignore.
The Court did what the political executive would not: it became Delhi’s chief pollution regulator. By doing so, it won the admiration of citizens desperate for clean air. But it also unintentionally created a governance vacuum. Once the Court took charge, governments found it easier to perform compliance, file affidavits, and wait for the next hearing instead of building a permanent, accountable regulatory regime.
Season after season, the Court hauls officials in, demands status updates, threatens offenders, and issues directions that are widely obeyed in the breach. Judges cannot run air-quality grids, cannot re-engineer crop patterns, cannot redesign transport systems, cannot discipline municipal contractors, and cannot force politicians to swallow the bitter medicine of structural reform.
Delhi’s air crisis continues because every actor—Centre, states, municipalities, courts—does just enough to avoid blame but not enough to fix the system. The Union government avoids confronting farmers’ unions on MSP distortions or power subsidies that incentivize paddy.
Punjab and Haryana avoid investing in deep crop diversification or enforcing strict penalties on residue burning. Uttar Pradesh avoids tackling the industrial belt that spews pollutants toward the capital. Delhi avoids redesigning mobility, urban planning, and waste enforcement. CAQM avoids using its statutory teeth. And the Supreme Court, in trying to pull all the threads together, ends up reminding everyone that even a powerful judiciary cannot compensate for a weak, fragmented executive.
A genuinely empowered regulatory regime would need to do things no government has had the stomach for: impose emission caps across sectors; expand Delhi’s bus fleet to global standards; enforce ruthless parking restrictions; ban old diesel commercial fleets across NCR; shut or relocate polluting industrial clusters; ensure agricultural procurement rewards less residue-intensive crops; introduce fines and incentives that actually change behaviour; unify land use and construction regulations across state borders; and build an independent regional clean-air authority with its own budget, scientists, enforcement wings and penalties.
None of this fit into election cycles. All of this threatens powerful constituencies—urban motorists, farmers, builders, mall owners, contractors, and industrial lobbies. The air remains dirty because clean air would be politically expensive.
Delhi’s smog is therefore not merely an environmental problem. It is a mirror of our collective political economy-our reluctance to confront the groups that pay for campaigns, crowd rallies, or mobilize anger.
For decades, the city’s residents have accepted the winter’s poison as a natural inconvenience, not as a political failure. Until clean air becomes a voting issue-until children’s lungs matter as much as electricity bills, religious identity, or caste arithmetic-governments will continue to rely on cosmetic fixes.
Delhi’s choking winter is not destiny. It is choice. And as long as the cost of inaction is borne silently by anonymous citizens, while the cost of action threatens powerful organized groups, that choice will remain the same.
The real question, then, is not why the government has failed to act. It is: what will finally make clean air more politically valuable than dirty compromise?
(This is an opinion piece, and views expressed are those of the author only)
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