— ✍️ Hitesh Kumar

Delhi continues to inhale toxic air, with some recordings showing an AQI maximum of 999. Experts at AIIMS have declared it ‘a public health emergency’ where the crisis is causing severe respiratory damage, cardiovascular risks, neurological impairments, and most importantly, a psychological decline in quality of life. The citizens are protesting on the streets, demanding clean, breathable air. The State of Global Air 2025 report shows that India recorded over two million deaths linked to toxic air in 2023. According to the World Air Quality report of 2024, out of the hundred top-most polluted cities of the world, ninety-four are from India, with the capital city at the top. All this, and the government is busy watering down the problem and manipulating the AQI data rather than working on a permanent solution for the crisis.

The problem is typically framed by mainstream discourse as a failure of governance, a lack of technology, and stubble burning by farmers of Haryana and Punjab. But the problem runs much deeper than we see. It's much more than just a failure of the administration to provide its citizens with something as basic as clean air.

1. Why the sky is grey

 The issue is much deeper of a systemic problem rather than just administrative inaction and policy paralysis. Metropolitan cities like Delhi are being developed for profit maximisation, causing a predictable metabolic rupture in the environment caused by the capitalist relations of production. According to the U.S Geological Survey, Delhi has been experiencing one of the fastest urban expansions in the world. Its geographic size almost doubled from 1991 to 2011, with the number of urban households doubling in number. This rapid urbanization led to several environmental consequences that we face today.

With the rapid growth, little attention has been paid to the environment and sustainable development. Hence, unregulated industrial expansion and capitalist exploitation resulted in the disruption of the natural cycles of the ecosystem. This leads to environmental degradation and socioeconomic inequalities that the city faces today.  Today, not just Delhi’s air but water, soil, land, everything is polluted. The city is unlivable.

2.  Green Revolution as a driver of today’s agrarian crisis

There has been a governance vacuum with the failure of ‘cooperative federalism’ and a recurring blame game between the state governments of Haryana, Punjab, UP, the Delhi government, and the Union government. The alleged main accused of the Delhi pollution is the stubble burning by farmers of Haryana and Punjab. Arguably, stubble burning contributes approximately 30 per cent to Delhi’s air pollution during the peak winter months (numbers vary in different reports). However, the root cause of the stubble burning is not ‘traditional’ but the Green Revolution. Diverse cropping patterns were replaced by a water-intensive paddy-wheat cycle, and Haryana and Punjab were transformed into ‘grain factories” to serve the needs of national food security.

The Punjab Preservation of Subsoil Water Act 2009 delays the sowing to preserve groundwater during the high evaporation period in summer. This shrank the window between rice harvest and wheat sowing to just 10-15 days. As a result, the poor and small farmers who can’t afford the labour and machinery to manage straw, burning is the only economically rational choice left with them.

Moreover, as per the Times of India, “Punjab farmers are not to be blamed for Delhi’s smog”, aid Indian Council of Agricultural Research chief ML Jat, citing a dramatic fall in stubble burning.

And Punjab has cut paddy fires by 92 percent in five years, dropping from 62,718 cases in 2021 to 4,732 this season, according to the Punjab Pollution Control Board, The Indian Express reported.

3.  The Legal and Policy Framework

In the landmark judgement of Arjun Gopal v. Union of India (2018), the Hon’ble Supreme Court established that the right to breathe clean air is as integral to the right to life under Article 21 of the Indian Constitution. And in another landmark ruling in M.K. Ranjitsinh & Ors. v. Union of India & Ors. (2024) for the first time court recognised that the “right to be free from the adverse effects of climate change” is integral to the fundamental rights enshrined under Articles 21 and 14 of the Indian Constitution, which provide the right to equality and life.

But things have only remained in theory. In contrast to robust statutes like the Environment Protection Act 1986, there is a lack of ground-level enforcement. There have been attempts to solve the structural economic contradictions with procedural laws.

i.   Criminalising the Victims

The primary legal strategy has been to ban stubble burning and penalize the farmers as per the ‘Polluter Pays’ principle. It blatantly ignores the relations of production between the farmers and the market. Fining a debt-ridden farmer squeezed by corporate input costs and stagnant Minimum Support Price (MSP) when the market offers no viable alternative turns an economic victim into a legal criminal.

Secondly, reactionary measures like Odd-Even used by the previous government only serve temporarily, causing discomfort to the public instead of offering a lasting solution. The approach used by governments puts the onus on citizens, where they are the ones responsible for everything, and they are the ones who need to work for the solutions.

There is a need to change this individualistic approach to a more systematic approach, where the state needs to realise its responsibility towards its citizens.

ii.    The System’s Hypocrisy

On November 20, the Supreme Court accepted the new definition for Aravalli Hills recommended by the Union Environment Ministry, ‘any landform that is at an elevation of 100 m or more above the local relief will be considered as part of Aravalli Hills along with its slopes and adjacent land’. Ironically, while this new definition aims to regulate mining in the Aravalli’s, this new criterion means that 90 per cent of the low-lying ecologically critical parts are no longer considered part of the official hills.

The court has banned the granting of any new mining leases until the Ministry of Environment, Forest, and Climate Change finalizes a sustainable mining plan; however, existing mining operations can continue. This will have severe environmental consequences and will potentially worsen the air pollution in Delhi. At times when we expect necessary judicial intervention to address the situation, such news comes as a shock. It also exposes the hypocrisy of our ironic legal-policy framework, where environmentalism and sustainability only find space in theory and school textbooks, while in reality, Mother Nature is only a medium to extract resources and maximise profits.

4.  Commodification of the Commons

Vehicular pollution and construction waste are the other two most important contributors to the Delhi air pollution. Road transport ministry data reveals that Delhi has approximately 1.57 crore registered vehicles, which is as high as the combined total of Mumbai, Kolkata, and Chennai. Delhi produces an estimated 6,000 tonnes of construction and demolition waste every day.

The accumulation of capital in Delhi through construction, vehicular expansion, and industrial growth treats the atmosphere as a free dumping ground. Driven by real estate speculation, the city has been turned into ‘the Urban Heat Island’ with no ventilation but only profit maximisation.

This has led to a huge class divide and health gap, widening along with economic disparity. Something as natural as clean air has been commodified, which only the privileged can access through buying expensive air purifiers for their apartments and offices, effectively ‘privatising clean air.’ Reports show there has been a 60-70 percent surge in the sale and trade of air purifiers and masks, making it luxury to a necessity.

On the other hand, the people who are going to be the most affected are the working class, people who have the most interaction with nature. For them, staying home is not a choice. They can't afford expensive air purifiers or even N95 masks. The 90 percent population that runs our city. The rikshawalas, hawkers, daily wage workers, sweepers, etc. They are the ones most affected by climate change and have the least say in the policy framework and the ‘Fight against pollution’.

5.   GRAP – Managing Symptoms, Not Causes

 On November 12, 2025, the Graded Response Action Plan level-3 or GRAP-3 was implemented in Delhi, under which governments and private Offices in Delhi were told to work at 50 percent strength on-site and the rest in work-from-home mode and on the 26^th November, the Commission for Air Quality Management (CAQM) lifted the stage 3 ban, citing ‘slight improvement in air quality when the average AQI recorded was 327.

The GRAP operates on a reactionary basis (e.g., if AQI hits 400, ban construction/trucks). It doesn’t offer any permanent solution, preserves the status quo by merely managing symptoms rather than curing the disease itself. Measures like Odd-Even, using water sprinklers, banning old vehicles, stopping trucks, halting constructions, or simply asking people to stay indoors are just a technocratic band-aid.

5.  Failure of Technological Fixes

 Under the 2019 National Clean Air Project, 19,700 crore was allocated for addressing pollution. And by 2024, only 57 percent of it was utilized, out of which 64 percent was spent just on dust control measures like water sprinklers, 13 percent on vehicular pollution, and only 0.6 percent on industrial pollution.

The government has tried building Smog towers and modern measures like Cloud Seeding, which have failed drastically. These are examples of Ecological Modernisation – the belief that technology alone can fix the problem caused by the system without changing the system itself. In reality, these are just capital-intensive distractions turning pollution control into a new market for corporate contracts, giving us an illusion that something is being done, while the fundamental problem remains untouched.

Measures:

The problem is not recent and has only worsened over the years. Neither is it a problem of one city or one state alone. We should have no shame in admitting that pollution is a national crisis, and we should react accordingly. And the solution lies in moving beyond reactive emergency measures to structural long-term reforms. The pollution is just Delhi’s problem alone; it ignores borders and needs comprehensive coordination amongst states and the centre, rather than just treating Delhi in isolation.

To tackle the issue of stubble burning, measures like socializing means of residue management and establishing machinery collectives can be adopted. Where farmers are provided with machinery for residue management at subsidized rates. And crop residue should be collected from farmers as a social resource, further using it for biomass energy or composting.

Secondly, focus should be paid on improving the public transport system, making it accessible as well as affordable. The solution is not electric vehicles but a massive expansion of a free, high-quality public transport system.

Thirdly, dust and construction control measures should be strictly enforced. Urban planning must prioritize city health over real estate profit. Rather than just converting the city into a concrete jungle, focus should be on sustainable development, protecting the forests of Aravalli as a green lung, the last green defence of Delhi. And policies should be designed keeping the ‘commons’ in focus, how things affect the have-nots and the subaltern.

Lastly, as long as agriculture is driven by profit maximization and cities are designed for capital accumulation, our air will remain toxic. The solution is not a new law or taller smog tower, but a fundamental restructuring of the relationship between nature and humans.

- The author is a final-year Law student at the Faculty of Law, University of Delhi.