Opinion | Work From Home Is No Shield Against Toxic Air — Unless Indoor Discipline Is Followed

When Delhi’s air turns toxic, the advice comes quickly and routinely: work from home, stay indoors, reduce exposure. The guidance feels self-evident. If the air outside is dangerous, staying inside must surely be safer. The problem is that this advice is incomplete — and, in many homes, quietly misleading.

Work from home (WFH) does help. But only under conditions that are rarely explained, poorly understood, and almost never communicated to the public. Without those conditions, WFH can create a false sense of protection: exposure shifts indoors, but pollution does not disappear. In fact, it often accumulates.

That is a reality Delhi needs to confront. The intuition is comforting and simple. Traffic emissions are high, commuting is risky, and staying

home avoids both. Therefore, staying home must be protective.

This belief echoes another assumption Delhi once held — that if traffic slowed and factories paused, the city would breathe easier. The lockdown shattered that illusion. Roads emptied, economic activity stopped, yet pollution persisted. We learned, painfully, that Delhi’s air problem was not just about visible activity, but about deeper atmospheric chemistry and regional dynamics.

WFH suffers from the same misunderstanding. It reduces one exposure pathway — commuting — but it does not neutralise polluted air itself. In a city where secondary particulate matter dominates, pollution is regional, persistent, and formed in the atmosphere. It does not remain neatly outdoors waiting to be avoided.

When you stay home, you do not escape polluted air. You merely change where you encounter it. The uncomfortable truth is that indoor and outdoor air pollution are closely correlated. In most urban homes, 70 to 90 per cent of fine particles indoors originate outdoors, entering through windows, doors, cracks, and ventilation systems. Indoor air quality therefore, tracks ambient air quality closely.

But the similarity ends there. Outdoors, pollution often peaks and disperses with wind and atmospheric mixing. Indoors, pollution accumulates. Poor ventilation design, blocked exhausts, or misuse of air-conditioning can trap pollutants for hours.

Recirculation mode with clean AC filters can reduce exposure; fresh-air mode during severe pollution imports smog directly indoors.

Faulty ventilation can silently spike indoor PM₂.₅ even when windows are shut.

Staying indoors, therefore, is not protection by itself. It works only if indoor air is actively prevented from becoming a reservoir.

What worsens this problem is not exotic behaviour. It is routine life. Cooking fumes, incense, mosquito coils, dry sweeping, and chemical cleaners routinely raise indoor pollution two to five times above outdoor levels, especially in homes that are not well sealed.

In Indian conditions, where nearly 80 per cent of homes allow easy air leakage, these emissions combine with infiltrated ambient pollution rather than replacing it. This matters because Indians spend close to 90 per cent of their time indoors — far more during WFH periods.

Exposure is therefore shaped as much by kitchens and living rooms as by traffic junctions. Yet few people are ever told basic, practical guidance: that exhausts matter as much as fuel choice, that dry sweeping on bad-air days is counter-productive, and that ventilation is beneficial only when outdoor air allows it.

The result is a paradox. People stay indoors to escape pollution, but unknowingly recreate it inside. Pollution, moreover, does not affect all homes equally. In well-sealed homes with electric cooking, filtered air-conditioning, and air purifiers, WFH genuinely reduces exposure. In poorer or informal housing — where biomass cooking, shared kitchens, leaky structures, and absent exhausts are common — WFH can deliver higher cumulative doses, not lower.

This is how pollution entrenches inequality. The same advisory — stay indoors — protects one household and burdens another. Exposure falls for the privileged, but quietly rises for those with the least control over indoor conditions.

This is also why governments are right to be cautious. Mandating indoor air-quality standards in private homes would be unenforceable and unjust amid vast housing variation. More importantly, without reliable ambient air quality, such mandates would be meaningless, merely shifting institutional failure onto citizens. The correct response is not legally enforceable standards, but clear and honest advisories that explain how indoor air behaves and what simple discipline can prevent harm.

When outdoor air is bad, the goal indoors is not perfection. It is simply not making things worse. Indoor discipline, in this context, is straightforward. It means eliminating indoor smoke altogether, whether from cigarettes, incense, candles, or mosquito coils. It means using low-smoke methods on bad-air days, using exhausts consistently, and preventing smoke from spreading into living spaces. It means treating windows as valves rather than reflexes — keeping them closed during severe pollution and ventilating briefly only when wind, rain, or midday mixing improves air quality. It means using air-conditioners wisely, recognising that recirculation with clean filters helps while fresh-air intake during smog does not. It also means avoiding activities that resuspend dust, such as dry sweeping or vigorous indoor exercise, and prioritising one cleaner indoor space rather than attempting to purify an entire home.

These steps do not clean Delhi’s air. They simply prevent indoor exposure from being quietly compounded. When WFH is advised without this indoor discipline, three things happen. People assume they are safe when they may not be. Responsibility subtly shifts from institutions to individuals. And inequality deepens. WFH must never be mistaken for governance success. It is not a substitute for better air management. Delhi has already learned the cost of confusing comfort with truth. Empty roads once gave false hope. Quiet homes risk doing the same. Work from home can help — but only with discipline. And never a substitute for the institutional responsibility of improving ambient air quality.

(The writer is former Chief Secretary, J&K, and former Chairman, Central Pollution Control Board. Views expressed are personal and solely those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.)