6 min readNov 13, 2026 06:31 PM IST First published on: Nov 13, 2026 at 06:31 PM ISTAir pollution is deadly across India. Initially, we thought that the daily question, “What is the AQI today?” would be one step towards creating political pressure on the issue. But Delhi’s obsession with the AQI number now hardly seems like a mechanism of accountability. It increasingly feels like it is turning each citizen into an individual monitoring his or her own daily dose of poison. There is the legendary story of King Mithridates, who, apparently as a toxicologist, monitored his own poison intake to develop immunity. But our monitoring of poison is now in the service of accepting a fait accompli. It is a measure of how low our expectations of life are: Breathing, walking, basic health, being outdoors no longer matter.This exhausting feeling is reinforced by the surreal sense that fighting pollution seems more like a ritual incantation. The mist cannon in Delhi sprinkling water, the way you might think Gangajal is purifying our sins. The anti-smog gun that feels more like a grating conch conceding defeat than one announcing battle. The tattered green nets on construction sites, more like a ritual thread than an effective way of keeping dust away. The road vacuum cleaners, few and far between, seem like the ritual sweeping of the sacrificial space. Waste management continues to be a disaster. The ritual tree-planting drive where saplings seem like a single forlorn tulasi plant even as the forest cover blows away. The obsession with Delhi’s AQI numbers, as if Delhi was the sacred site, the rest of India be damned.AdvertisementThen there is the usual hunt for the seasonal disruptors: The farmers, the firecrackers. The state gets to talk about visible, seasonal, short-duration events, without cleaning up the underlying environment. For critics of the state, stubble-burning bans or firecracker bans get to play victim. A public-health measure like a firecracker ban gets converted into another occasion for civilisational victimhood. Rather than asking the question — what would it take to live in an environment where burning firecrackers did not badly affect our health — we think of the ban itself as a kind of curse that will destroy our civilisation. This, too, is an annual ritual.Also Read | What the AQI isn’t telling you about air pollutionBut the rituals get even more grotesque. India is an appallingly unequal society. This paper reported that a 15-day CAQM ban on construction ahead of Diwali left 70 per cent of daily-wage labourers in places like Gurgaon and Manesar without any financial relief; workers who mostly work without any precaution against construction-related dust all year. The ban on small fires and “dirty energy” affects the poor, small businesses and eateries. Every regulation seems to first regulate the survival strategies of the poor. Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health, US, had, during Covid, coined the resonant phrase “laptop class” to argue that many anti-Covid measures protected the laptop class while exposing ordinary workers to risks and costs. Arguably, this is more severe in the case of “anti-pollution” measures. Work-from-home measures might be designed to reduce the use of vehicles, and some services can indeed be performed from home. But it effectively signals that the disproportionate burden will again fall on the poor. It is curious how much environmentalism is experienced as the policing of the poor. This is perhaps why there is little public support or demand for a lot of environmental measures.India’s anti-pollution measures are not just in the realm of magical thinking or policing the poor. The government has rolled out several major initiatives: Clean energy, transition to EVs, etc. The national clean air programme covers over a hundred cities. Many industries have been converted to cleaner fuels, and polluting industries relocated. There are questions about whether they are scaled up to the task at hand; whether we want to invest in the kind of state capacity that can make these schemes work. Increasingly, federalism is turning out to be a bigger challenge for India’s environmental ambitions. Ecological boundaries or airsheds do not coincide with political boundaries, and essentially every jurisdiction wants to externalise the costs to another state or shift blame.AdvertisementIt has also to be said that there is simply no political demand or pressure in most states apart from Delhi for any environmental measures. But you do wonder whether even in Delhi cleaning the air is a priority. One of the more exciting schemes announced was Parivartan, where the government will give subsidies to replace commercial vehicles with BS VI standard vehicles or transition to EVs. But the scheme is confined to the NCR. There is an obvious case for beginning in the NCR, where the crisis is acute. But the lack of national strategy will haunt us. More fundamentally, we still seem to be learning the wrong lesson. Even in areas where pollution is not as severe as in the NCR, we need to price in environmental externalities and think of new designs for transport systems rather than simply dump Delhi’s vehicles elsewhere. The transition to cleaner commercial transport should not have to wait for 1,000-plus AQI. We made that mistake once.As of today, only 56,000 vehicles have been registered under the scheme, and only a few hundred operators have actually availed themselves of the subsidy. Apparently, the subsidy on offer is still insufficient to make the conversion financially viable. This points to a familiar problem, be it stubble burning or old vehicles: Incentives are not scaled to objectives. But here one cannot help noticing the contrast between the assiduousness with which the government has made subsidies work for PLI schemes and its inability to make them work for environmental schemes. Its energy is still on the “production” side; the environment is the afterthought. For breathable air, do the annual rituals, and hope like Mithridates that you are immune to the poison.The writer is contributing editor, The Indian Express