On India's air pollution catastrophe: the year-round industrial poisoning we ignore, the farmers we scapegoat, and the billions we lose pretending it's someone else's problem

My younger son is four. Last month, his paediatrician looked at me with the weariness of a man who has delivered the same diagnosis too many times and said: "His airways are chronically inflamed. You need to leave the city, at least during the winters." I nodded as if this were reasonable advice, as if uprooting a family were as simple as booking a flight. As if we had not heard this before, when his brother—now eleven—first developed his persistent cough seven years ago.

I have been in and out of Delhi for decades, moving away for work and education, returning for family. Each return brings fresh horror at what the air has become. My boys have grown up knowing the colour of the sky is not supposed to be grey in November, that the burning sensation in their throats is not normal, that other children in other countries do not check an app before deciding whether to play outside.

We do not have air purifiers. Most middle-class households now do—it has become as standard as a refrigerator, another appliance you simply must have if you live in Delhi and can afford one. We have managed without, relying on sealed windows and the hope that our flat is high enough to escape the worst of it. It is not.

The Numbers We Should Know

Let me be precise about what we are discussing. In 2022, India accounted for nearly 70% of all global deaths caused by air pollution—1.72 million people, a 38% increase since 2010. The global annual toll is 2.5 million deaths. Nearly three out of every four occur in India alone.

Delhi is the epicentre, but this is emphatically an all-India crisis. Lucknow, Patna, Varanasi, Kolkata—the Indo-Gangetic Plain is a contiguous belt of toxic air. According to the 2024 State of Global Air Report, every single one of India's 1.4 billion citizens breathes air that exceeds WHO guidelines. My children are not outliers; they are the norm.

The economic damage is staggering. The Lancet Planetary Health study calculated that lost output from premature deaths and morbidity cost India $36.8 billion in 2019—1.36% of GDP. A Dalberg study puts the true figure at $95 billion annually—roughly 3% of GDP—when accounting for reduced productivity, absenteeism, and healthcare costs. Delhi alone loses 6% of its GDP each year. The 2025 Lancet Countdown report goes further: 9.5% of GDP when welfare losses are fully accounted.

Tourism suffers a 0.7% annual decline in arrivals, costing $1.7 billion. Consumer footfall drops during the smog months, with $22 billion in annual losses. Yet somehow, we continue to treat this as a seasonal inconvenience rather than an existential economic threat.

The Politics of Breathing

In February 2025, the BJP won Delhi's state elections after 27 years, ending AAP's decade-long rule. The party promised to halve AQI by 2030, reduce PM2.5 and PM10 concentrations by 50%, transition half of all vehicles to electric or CNG, and add 5,000 electric buses.

Here is what matters: the BJP now controls both Delhi and the central government, which it has held since 2014. This "double-engine sarkar" eliminates the convenient excuse of centre-state conflicts. The party that promised transformative environmental action now has total accountability for delivering it. No more finger-pointing at the previous administration. No more blaming states with different ruling parties.

In November 2025, the government attempted cloud seeding to wash away the smog. Three attempts failed because there was insufficient moisture in the atmosphere—a fact any meteorologist could have predicted about Delhi's dry winter months. "This is honestly the worst possible choice to mitigate air pollution," said M. Rajeevan, former Secretary of the Ministry of Earth Sciences. Even if successful, it would have been a temporary fix, reducing pollution for a day or two while ignoring the root causes.

Anti-smog guns and water sprinklers make for good photo opportunities. They do not make for environmental policy.

The Real Culprits: What We Refuse to See

Every winter, the national conversation follows a predictable script: farmers in Punjab and Haryana burn their stubble, Delhi chokes, politicians express outrage, and by January, we have forgotten. But this narrative is a convenient fiction that obscures the year-round industrial poisoning of the Indo-Gangetic Plain.

A 2024 analysis by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air found that India's coal-fired thermal power plants emit 240 times more sulphur dioxide than stubble burning—4,327 kilotonnes versus 17.8 kilotonnes annually. Thermal plants in the NCR region alone emit 16 times more SO₂ than all the stubble burning combined. They contribute ten times more PM2.5 than crop burning.

India is the world's largest emitter of sulphur dioxide—16% of the global total. Coal plants account for 47% of our power generation capacity but 71% of electricity produced. Within a 300-kilometre radius of Delhi, there are 11-12 coal plants. Only one—the Mahatma Gandhi Thermal Power Station in Haryana—is fully compliant with emission norms. One other has partial compliance. The rest continue to poison the air, every day, all year round.

In December 2024, the Ministry of Environment issued yet another extension—the fourth since 2015—for thermal plants to install flue gas desulphurisation systems. Category A plants, those within 10 kilometres of Delhi-NCR, were supposed to comply by December 2022. The new deadline? December 2027. As of November 2024, only 8% of 537 thermal power plant units have installed FGD systems. The Modi government has pushed the deadline four times after power producers wrote over 20 letters lobbying against the emission norms. A former Minister of State for Power, R.K. Singh, defended the delays by noting that "even human beings emit carbon dioxide."

The contrast with how we treat farmers is instructive. In October 2024 alone, 18 farmers in Haryana were arrested and 400 were banned from selling their produce at mandis for two years—for stubble burning. Meanwhile, coal plants that emit 240 times more pollution receive repeated deadline extensions and face no penalties.

The "Green" Solution Poisoning Millions

I live near the Okhla waste-to-energy plant, and for years I have witnessed residents of Sukhdev Vihar wage a legal battle (as a participant too) that deserves far more attention than it has received. In November 2024, a five-year investigation by The New York Times exposed what residents had long suspected: the plant, operated by Jindal Group's JITF Infralogistics, has been exposing nearly a million people to toxic emissions containing cadmium, lead, and arsenic.

The investigation, conducted with scientists from Johns Hopkins University and IIT Delhi, collected over 150 air and soil samples between 2019 and 2023. Cadmium levels were found to be 19 times higher than EPA limits, manganese 11 times, arsenic 10 times. Dioxin emissions—among the most toxic chemicals known, infamously used as a defoliant during the Vietnam War—exceeded legal limits by up to ten times. Toxic ash has been dumped near residential areas, including neighbourhoods close to schools and parks.

The residents of Sukhdev Vihar first filed a writ petition before the Delhi High Court in 2009 to relocate the plant. The NGT allowed the plant to continue despite violations in 2017. People have sold their houses and moved away. Those who remain report rising cases of respiratory illnesses, skin infections, and what they describe as "black phlegm."

Yet the response from authorities has been to expand WTE capacity. Delhi currently operates four such plants. The Central Pollution Control Board's 2021 report found that all three functioning plants violated pollution norms, with excess dioxins, furans, hydrochloric acid, and particulate matter. The penalty? A Rs 5 lakh fine for each plant—roughly $6,000, less than the cost of a mid-range car.

Now, a new 30-megawatt WTE plant is proposed for Bawana, to be built by the same Jindal subsidiary. Residents from over 15 villages are protesting. The fundamental problem is structural: Indian municipal waste has high moisture content and low calorific value, making combustion inefficient and hazardous. These plants need additional fuel to operate, increasing their carbon footprint. Without proper segregation, they end up burning mixed waste, producing harmful ash and worsening air quality.

The Farmers We Scapegoat

The stubble burning narrative deserves a more honest examination. Punjab and Haryana produce 28-29 million tonnes of rice stubble annually, of which approximately 80% is burnt. This is not ignorance or negligence—it is structural compulsion created by policy choices.

The Green Revolution transformed Punjab and Haryana into the nation's granary through aggressive promotion of the paddy-wheat cycle—in regions never ideally suited for such water-intensive cropping. By the 2000s, groundwater tables had collapsed. Punjab's Sub-Soil Water Conservation Act of 2009 mandated delaying paddy transplanting until June to align with the monsoon, which pushed the harvest into late October and created a window of just 10-20 days between rice harvest and wheat sowing.

The economics are brutal. A Happy Seeder—the machine that can incorporate stubble into soil—costs Rs 2,000-3,000 per acre to rent. For a marginal farmer with less than two hectares, this is prohibitive. Burning costs the price of a matchbox and some diesel. Rice straw, unlike wheat straw, has high silica content and cannot be used as fodder. There is no market for the residue. Labour is scarce. Mechanised harvesters leave 10-30cm of stubble that manual methods cannot address in time.

A 2022 study estimated that 44,000-98,000 PM2.5-related deaths annually can be attributed to crop burning in northwest India. The economic cost to Punjab, Haryana, Delhi, and western UP is approximately $30 billion annually. But the question we refuse to ask is: who created the conditions that made burning the only rational choice?

The Minimum Support Price system continues to incentivise paddy cultivation despite its ecological unsuitability. Alternatives like kinnow face marketing challenges and unstable prices. Farmers who experimented with diversification have returned to paddy for security. The policy ecosystem that created this crisis remains intact. We criminalise farmers for the logical outcome of our own policy failures.

Who Pays, Who Profits

Let us be clear about something: the concept of the "individual carbon footprint" was popularised by BP through an advertising campaign designed to shift responsibility for climate change from fossil fuel companies to individual consumers. It is perhaps the most successful piece of corporate propaganda of the 21st century.

According to the IPCC, approximately 70% of global CO₂ emissions come from just 100 companies. In India, Rohit Azad and Shouvik Chakraborty's research in the Economic and Labour Relations Review demonstrated the stark class dimensions of emissions: the richest 10% of Indians contribute 27% of emissions, while the poorest 10% contribute just 3.5%. Their work on India's carbon inequality, published in Economic and Political Weekly, showed that carbon emissions are fundamentally a class issue—the wealthy consume more, emit more, and are better positioned to escape the consequences.

This matters because it shapes how we think about air pollution. Every winter, we are told to avoid driving, to carpool, to stay indoors. Middle-class guilt is monetised through air purifier sales, N95 masks, indoor plants that supposedly clean the air. Meanwhile, coal plants continue to operate without FGD systems. WTE plants dump toxic ash near residential areas. The same government that arrests farmers for burning stubble grants repeated extensions to industrial polluters.

The class dimensions of exposure are equally stark. Politicians and senior bureaucrats work in air-conditioned, purified environments. Their children attend schools with sealed classrooms and air filtration. Auto-rickshaw drivers, construction workers, street vendors, traffic police—they have no escape. A 2020 investigation by The New York Times documented how five-year-old Monu, from a slum in east Delhi, was exposed to pollution levels his body could not handle, while five-year-old Aamya, from an affluent family, could retreat to purified indoor environments. The life expectancy gap between them could be five years or more.

Azad's broader work on India's political economy consistently emphasises this point: the costs of policy failures fall disproportionately on those least able to bear them, while the benefits accrue to those who need them least. Air pollution is no different.

The Ethanol Mirage

India achieved E20—20% ethanol blending in petrol—in 2025, five years ahead of schedule. The government celebrates this as an environmental achievement: 30% lower CO₂ emissions compared to E10, better acceleration, higher octane ratings. The story is more complicated.

Ethanol has 27% lower energy content than petrol, translating to a 5-7% drop in fuel efficiency for vehicles calibrated for E10. The programme requires approximately 1,000 crore litres of ethanol annually, produced from 45-50 million tonnes of sugarcane and grains. This is extraordinarily water-intensive: 8-12 litres of water for every litre of ethanol produced. Distilleries are classified as "red category" industries, emitting acetaldehyde, formaldehyde, and acrolein—all linked to respiratory problems and cancer.

India became a net maize importer in 2024-25 partly because of diversion to ethanol production. Land competition between food and fuel intensifies as the programme expands. Lifecycle analyses that account for sugarcane cultivation show increased land and water use, agrochemical inputs, and elevated human toxicity.

Perhaps most critically, investment in ethanol infrastructure may slow the transition to electric vehicles, which offer substantially higher long-term emission reductions. We are locking ourselves into a transitional technology that addresses a fraction of the problem while creating new ones.

What Would It Take?

The World Bank estimates that India's GDP would be 4.5% higher if pollution had been halved over the past 25 years. The northern states—Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh—bear the highest economic burden as a proportion of state GDP. Delhi has the highest per-capita loss. This is not a Delhi problem. This is an India problem.

What would genuine action look like? It would start with enforcing existing norms on thermal power plants—no more deadline extensions, no more lobbying-driven deferrals. It would mean shutting down WTE plants that violate emission standards and abandoning the expansion of a technology fundamentally unsuited to Indian waste characteristics. It would require dismantling the MSP regime that locks farmers into water-intensive paddy cultivation and instead subsidising the transition to ecologically appropriate crops.

It would mean recognising that cloud seeding and anti-smog guns are political theatre, not environmental policy. It would mean acknowledging that individual behaviour change, while valuable, cannot substitute for systemic industrial regulation. It would mean stopping the criminalisation of farmers while extending indefinite clemency to corporations.

I think about my sons, about what their lungs are absorbing with every breath, about the healthcare costs we will bear, about the years that may be shaved off their lives. I think about the paediatrician's advice to leave the city, and how for millions of families this is not an option. I think about the auto-rickshaw drivers navigating traffic without masks, the construction workers on scaffolding without protection, the children in government schools without air purifiers.

The air quality index is a number. What it represents is a choice: a choice to prioritise industrial convenience over public health, to protect corporate interests over citizen welfare, to accept preventable deaths as the cost of development. We have made this choice for decades. We continue to make it every day the coal plants operate without FGD systems, every day the WTE plants emit dioxins, every day we arrest farmers while extending deadlines for polluters.

My sons will inherit this air. I am not sure what else they will inherit, but I know this: they will ask why we let it happen. And I do not have a good answer.

Varna Sri Raman is a development economist. She writes about economic policy, labour markets, and public health at varna.stck.me.