The air is killing us' Calls for long-term action as Delhi is choked by smog

Calls for long-term action as Delhi is choked by smog

- Hannah Ellis-Petersen

As winter sets in across north India, usually around the time of the country's biggest festival, Diwali, the air in Delhi becomes thick and brown with visible pollutants. To breathe in is to taste toxic fumes. The visibility is often so bad that famous monuments are reduced to blurs on the horizon. It is, as one writer once put it, as if a burial shroud has cloaked the city.

For a decade, Delhi has regularly held the dishonourable title of being the world's most polluted city, with other Indian cities close behind. A recent study calculated that the 30 million people living in and around the capital could have almost 12 years taken off their lives because of its health impacts.

"The air is killing us all," said Hartosh Singh, in between rasping coughs, as he pushed his fruit cart through Delhi's Bhogal market.

"The government is leaving us to die so that India can grow big. Every year more cars, more buildings, more rubbish, more factories, filling the air with filth - is that worth more than our lives?"

This week, Delhi's AQI - the measure of pollutants in the air - went as high as 1700 in some parts of the city. At the worst point of Beijing's pollution crisis, the highest the AQI went was 1300. The number deemed healthy by the World Health Organization is 50.