The Big Story: Air Time

Delhi on Wednesday looked like a city from another world. With winter rolling in, it seemed as if fog had already taken over the national capital right at the start of November – except the pall that hung over the city was toxic smoke and particulate matter. Pollution levels on Wednesday were 10 times the safe limit and the visibility, according to authorities at the airport, was in the 300 metre-500 metre range, equivalent to the most foggy days of December and January. Weather conditions, crop burning, the post-Diwali pollution and Delhi's geography turned the capital into a massive gas chamber.

In most cities of the world, including in China where the scale of the pollution problem is equivalent to India's, this would usually mean shutting down a city and taking emergency measures. Beijing, for example, issues a red alert – which mandates the shut down of schools and factories as well as taking cars off the roads – when the Air Quality Index is over 300 for two days in a row. On Wednesday, it hit 494 in some parts of Delhi, with the average at 432. The number for the previous two days was 389 and 445.

And yet, schools were still functioning, factories were still operating, people continued to walk on the streets and some were even still bursting firecrackers. Among the many dire conditions that India's capital has managed to normalise, air pollution so hazardous that you can see and feel it shaving years of your life expectancy must be the most palpable.

Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal had to cancel a Cabinet meeting on pollution after Delhi Police detained both him and deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia because of their attempt to visit a hospital after the suicide of an ex-soldier over the One Rank One Pension issue. Health Minister Satyender Jain insisted that the government was doing everything it could to manage pollution levels, but the fact that the city was still operating – with children still going to school – was itself telling.

Earlier in the week, the government did announce measures to address pollution but few expect those to do enough to combat what looks likely to be a truly deadly winter. The scale of the problem is massive and not limited to Delhi – India has 13 of the 20 most polluted cities on the planet. But the cancellation of the meeting on Wednesday was the perfect illustration of how an emergency situation affecting every citizen in the capital has been trumped by the chance to play politics ahead of next year's elections.

Our air is literally killing us. This is not normal and the city shouldn't treat it normally.

The Big Scroll

Scroll's Choking Cities looks at the causes and effects of this toxic pollution on India's cities and citizens.

  • Winter is coming but the pollution is already here. In fact, it never went away writes Mayank Jain.
  • Abhishek Dey looks at the question of whether an expensive air purifier is necessarily more effective?
  • Menaka Roy looks at what the Union Health Ministry is doing about the pollution. 

Political Pickings

  1. A retired soldier committed suicide in Delhi on Wednesday citing the government's failure to implement a full version of One Rank One Pension turned into a political storm, with Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi detained at the hospital, while Union Minister VK Singh questioned the "mental state" of the ex-serviceman.
  2. India withdrew eight officials from its mission in Islamabad hours after Pakistan called back six of its officials on Wednesday, all part of the fallout of the expulsion of a Pakistani official from New Delhi last week over espionage accusations. 
  3. Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav, a day before his yatra across the state, said that all is well within his family because "these things keep happening in politics. Some things are not in your control." 
  4. Akshaya Mukul, one of the Ramnath Goenka awardees, chose not to personally accept the award from Prime Minister Narendra Modi – the chief guest at the event – sending a representative instead, and saying that he "cannot live with the idea of Modi and me in the same frame".
  5. The Indian Express lists all the winners from the Ramnath Goenka awards for excellence in journalism here. 

Punditry

  1. "When policemen start filming themselves shooting at bodies already lying motionless, the perversity and audacity have reached a new low," writes Salil Tripathi in Mint, on the Bhopal incident. "It shows a state beyond shame."
  2. Suhas Palshikar in the Indian Express calls out the argument by MG Vaidya effectively calling for the state to disenfranchise anyone who doesn't agree with it.
  3. A Supreme Court judgment poses an old question to India’s labour movement, writes G Sampath in the Hindu: How to unionise contract workers?

Giggles

Don't Miss

Scroll.in's M Rajshekhar and Nayantara Narayanan won Ramnath Goenka awards for excellence in journalism on Wednesday. Read the stories that won them the awards here.

As part of Scroll.in's Ear to The Ground project, Rajshekhar spent nearly three months in Mizoram in early 2015, reporting on a range of processes shaping the state, from populist policies, weak state finances, shrinking funds for health programmes to crony capitalism. The last of these stories established political corruption in the state. It found that Lal Thanzara, the brother of the chief minister, held shares in a company that was getting road contracts from the state government. The story triggered a set of events that resulted in Lal Thanzara being forced to step down as cabinet minister and MLA.

In December 2015, Narayanan travelled to coastal Tamil Nadu which was reeling under severe floods. News coverage had been largely focused on Chennai even though many other districts were affected. Travelling through areas where highways were flooded and roads cut off, Nayantara filed a six-part series over patchy mobile and internet connectivity. Her reports highlight how relief efforts played out and sometimes failed on the ground. In Kanchipuram and Cuddalore, she reported on how entire villages had been cut off by physical and social barriers. Volunteers, who read Narayanan’s account about a Dalit settlement in Cuddalore left to fend for itself through 36 days of flooding, took relief material to the village within days of the story being published.