Each winter, Delhi transforms into a city under siege. The crisp October air quickly turns into a suffocating haze, and the world’s attention shifts once again to a familiar headline: Delhi – the most
polluted city on Earth. Schools shut, outdoor life collapses, and the simple act of breathing becomes hazardous. Every year, the blame game begins. And almost predictably, Diwali firecrackers are declared the primary offender. But this is a convenient fiction. Even a cursory look at data reveals that the true causes of Delhi’s smog are far more structural, far more chronic, and far more ignored. Fireworks may dominate narrative battles, but five real pollution giants determine whether Delhi breathes clean or chokes: road dust, vehicular emissions, biomass burning, diesel generators, and seasonal farm fires. The below analysis is a shorter version of a detailed paper published by me.
Road Dust: The Most Ignored Half of the Problem
On the streets of Delhi, the biggest polluter does not come from a tailpipe. It lies beneath our feet.
Almost every road edge is an open dust bank-unpaved soil, broken pavements, leftover construction material. Vehicles churn this reservoir into the air every second. Scientific studies have consistently shown that road dust contributes around 40% – sometimes even more – to Delhi’s PM pollution levels. By comparison, vehicles typically contribute about half that share. This means that if Delhi simply ensured no roadside had exposed soil – if every shoulder were paved or greened – the city could reduce particulate matter significantly in a single year.
The consequences of roadside dust reach beyond the lungs. Dust makes walking deeply unpleasant; a commuter leaving the metro must choose between ruined clothing and auto-rickshaws or personal vehicles. This drives up car dependency, worsening congestion and emissions. Dust-coated market areas repel customers, hurting street vendors and accelerating class-based segregation of public space. Environments that are dusty become garbage dumping grounds, further degrading living conditions. Fixing dust pollution does not just clean the air-it dignifies the city.
Vehicles Alone Cannot Explain the Crisis
Delhi’s vehicle count is huge, but its vehicle-related pollution is secondary when compared to the dust and external smoke that define the worst smog episodes. Cleaner fuels, phasing out old vehicles, electric mobility and congestion reduction are essential, yet improving vehicles alone cannot solve a problem dominated by non-vehicular sources.
Biomass & Waste Burning: The Night-Time Killer
For many lower-income residents, burning biomass is an unfortunate necessity – whether for warmth during freezing nights or for cooking when LPG affordability becomes uncertain. These countless fires emit ultrafine particles that accumulate overnight under winter inversion conditions. Hospitals see the results each morning. Eliminating biomass burning requires not just policing, but alternatives-affordable heating and reliable waste management.
Diesel Generators: Pollution at Breathing Level
Diesel gensets are an invisible pollution powerhouse. They operate even where electricity is stable, often due to habit or convenience. Their exhaust is not up in industrial chimneys-it hits children in schoolyards and shoppers in markets. Solutions exist: solar rooftops, battery storage, and strict retrofit compliance. What is missing is urgency.
The Farm Fire Tsunami
For roughly twenty days each year, Delhi’s air turns from unclean to unliveable because winds carry smoke from crop fires, primarily in Punjab and a few in parts of Haryana and Western UP. Peak contributions can hit 40-50% of Delhi’s pollution. These short bursts inflict long shadows: they establish the toxic baseline on which Delhi’s other pollutants accumulate.
The region has solutions: machinery subsidies, crop residue management systems, residue buy-back policies, and stricter enforcement. Haryana and Western UP have shown strong improvement; Punjab needs to follow at the same pace to prevent these annual smog tsunamis.
Firecrackers: A Soft Target
The dramatic spikes seen on Diwali night undoubtedly affect air quality. But what matters for public health is persistence. Firework emissions typically dissipate within 12-24 hours when winds shift. That is uncomfortable but not catastrophic.
The catastrophe is what follows-when relentless dust, biomass fires and incoming stubble smoke take over for the next 60-90 days. Banning crackers scratches a visible surface but leaves the tumour untouched.
Symbolic moves are easier than systemic reforms. And a cultural festival makes an easy villain for the assorted gang of activist and ‘secular’ politicians. Just a common sensical approach would have made it amply clear that Diwali fireworks have negligible to zero impact on Delhi’s pollution crisis in October-November every year. Crackers have been used since centuries. Yet, the yearly smoke chamber phenomenon in Delhi has become a reality only since 2014-15. Surely it could thus not be crackers but something new which was added to the mix. That ‘new’ was the stubble burning smoke, the season of which shifted by two months due to the law passed in Haryana and Punjab in 2009, the full effects of which starred manifesting a few years later. But the toxic nature of secular politics prioritised, for a decade, in villainising Diwali, rather than handling the toxic fumes from stubble fires.
Delhi Can Breathe Again If Priorities Shift
Delhi’s air crisis is not nature’s curse or geography’s destiny. It is a governance challenge.
A three-tier action plan can deliver clean air within a few years:
One year to eliminate road dust by fixing pavements, greening verges, enforcing construction norms and deploying mechanized sweeping.
Two years to end stubble burning through machinery support, residue utilization markets and collaborative enforcement across state borders including raising awareness among the farmers themselves.
Three years to phase out diesel gensets, eradicate biomass burning through access to clean energy and reform transport emissions structurally.
Delhi’s smog is man-made-and therefore, solvable. All it needs is lesser toxic politics of the secular kind and more action on the ground – in Delhi and around it.
The writer is the founding CEO of BlueKraft Digital Foundation. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
