New Delhi is suffocating as the annual curse of pollution returns with a vengeance

Schools closed in New Delhi on Friday, while some diesel vehicles were taken off the roads and much of the city’s relentless construction work halted, as authorities tried to ease the impact of a thick haze of pollution that has swept across India’s capital descended. a disaster that has become an annual plague.

Despite the mandates and a call for people to stay indoorsthe measures offered little relief for the many millions of residents of the city.

“Breathing becomes heavy and long,” says Ram Kumar, a 30-year-old from the city of Gorakhpur, in India’s more rural north, who supports his family at home by driving an auto-rickshaw in New Delhi. “At the end of the day, I feel like I just smoked 20 or 25 cigarettes,” he noted, adding that he can feel the “toxic smoke pouring into my chest.”

In terms of health, the deadliest pollution contains the finest matter; Regularly breathing air contaminated with the smallest particles has been linked to cancer, diabetes and other life-shortening conditions. In June, during Canada’s worst-ever wildfire season, New York saw its skies turn orange as smoke drifted over the area. The residents suffered from that type of pollution with a concentration of approximately 117 micrograms per cubic meter. In comparison, on Friday afternoon in Delhi the average was around 500 and in some places it was as high as 643.

The cause of the intense annual air pollution that plagues Delhi and most of northern India in early winter is difficult to pin down. Falling temperatures appear to play a major role as cooler air settles in the region, trapping pollutants and preventing them from spreading across the Himalayas. Vehicles are also a major part of the toxic stew, with dust from construction sites also contributing. For much of the past year, Mumbai, on the west coast, has suffered from even worse air pollution than Delhi, which many blame. Mumbai’s recent building boom.

But many scientists say one culprit is mainly responsible for Delhi’s smog: farmers burning rice stubble in Punjab, an agricultural state in the northwest. This practice is used as a cheap and effective way to clear mown fields after harvest and prepare them for next year’s harvest.

By some measurements, crop burning is responsible for about 25 percent of pollution over Delhi; Satellite images showed more than a thousand such fires in the state of Punjab alone on Sunday.

But the problem is exacerbated by the dysfunction of official power. Although the same group, the opposition Aam Aadmi Party, leads both Delhi and Punjab, the leaders of neither region have shown much ability to tackle the issue. Authorities in Punjab may be reluctant to crack down on farmers to avoid alienating a key voting bloc, while those in New Delhi have had little success in tackling urban pollution, especially from vehicles.

The national government, based in Delhi and led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, seemed equally powerless to bring about improvements. The Bharatiya Janata Party and Aam Aadmi are bitter rivals in the capital, with federal authorities weakening many of the city government’s powers. Several leaders of the capital region’s ruling party have also been arrested and held without bail on various charges, including money laundering, actions that some observers have described as politically motivated.

Jai Dhar Gupta, an environmentalist and consultant on air pollution, lamented the inaction on pollution. Given the number of lives affected, he said, the terrible air quality “should be called the public health emergency that it is.” He decried some of the city’s official efforts, such as dampening street dust to keep it on the sidewalk, as woefully inadequate.

Without tackling the causes of pollution, Mr. Gupta said, there would likely be little improvement. “There is fuel burning in vehicles, our waste burning, stubble burning, and many people in Delhi use biomass for cooking,” he noted. “You have to arrest those emission sources.”

If local and national authorities “are unable to solve a predictable problem, then that is a failure of leadership,” he added.