Delhi today does not have four seasons—it has five. Over the last decade, an entirely new “air pollution season” has colonised the calendar, spread between autumn and winter, and often seeps well into spring.
Yet, it has become increasingly clear that Delhi’s air pollution crisis is not seasonal at all, but a year-round condition with the air quality oscillating between “poor” and “very poor,” punctuated by hazardous spikes and relieved only briefly by the monsoon.
Though grey skies, burning eyes and itchy throats dominate headlines and flood social media this time of year, the harder questions of what is being done, who is accountable, and why nothing changes, are endlessly deferred.
One of the clearest indicators of genuine political intent in any pollution-control effort is the allocation of adequate financial resources.
Cities that succeeded did so not through slogans or seasonal gestures but through budgets proportional to the scale of the crisis, and by actually spending that money on structural reforms.
To see how Delhi compares with cities like Beijing, and to test the government’s stated commitment to cleaning the air, I filed an RTI seeking details of how much funding was allocated over the past five years, and how much of it was actually spent.