Leave Delhi, spend a few days in the mountains and take the evening train back. Having left a bog-ordinary city, you will return to a dystopic nightmare in which the streetlights pick out haloes of toxic brown and a constant fine rain of dust; sand and grit billow from rubble-like road edges; veils of dust fly from construction material; visible plumes of smoke drift at eye level; and diesel fumes spew from millions of sports utility vehicles (SUVs). And that's just what you can see. The stuff that's too small to see is far more dangerous.
We breathe this? It goes into our bodies with every breath? All the time? It can't be. It doesn't seem remotely possible. Your throat has begun to itch, your nose has begun to run or tingle or get stuffy, your eyes have begun to water, and your lungs are constricting. And yet, this state of bodily crisis is what you know as "the way it is". It abated when you left, and is setting in afresh now that you're back. All around, instead of being horrified and screaming blue murder, the good people of Delhi go about their business perfectly normally. It's Kafkaesque. Do they not see? Wasn't that you just five days ago? Won't that be you three days from now? For a precious few hours before ho-hum life takes over, you regain perspective. We live with this? Isn't this a public health emergency? Isn't this unacceptable?
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So it's been a relief to find Delhi's catastrophic air front-paged in a series of exhaustive articles in The Indian Express headlined "Death by Breath". After an inexplicable - and infuriating - silence on the subject, the Indian media is suddenly all over it. Earlier this year, The Times of India led a "Let Delhi breathe" campaign on the subject, and most news channels have by now done a show on it. Most newspapers have run editorials and op-eds on it. It's unfathomable that it has taken this long for India's most entitled citizens to sit up and start demanding that their health, and that of their children, be taken seriously. But better late than never.
The stark facts are common currency: Delhi has 8.43 million registered vehicles, compared with Mumbai's 2.33 million, Beijing's 5 million and London's 2.6 million vehicles. Delhi hasn't yet bothered to build itself a bypass, so that two-thirds of trucks that belch all over us are merely passing through. Delhi hasn't finished building the metro, or its last-mile connectivity. Delhi has subsidised and accepted polluting diesel for much too long (and was very recently still muttering that there's no Indian assessment of the health impact of diesel pollution). Delhi has not enforced construction and demolition regulations to control dust. Delhi tolerates the worst driving habits in the country so that gridlocked, idling traffic just sits there belching and breathing poison.
We should long ago have prioritised health and well-being. We have allowed things to slide, so that long-term solutions are now viscerally entangled with livelihoods, and we have no choice but to take painful steps. We need to campaign for a mindset that sees a developed city not as one in which the rich have cars, but one in which the rich choose public transport. The city can only incentivise that by creating a user-friendly public transport system. It needs to expand the metro and ensure connectivity to it. It needs to sort out public security so that women can use public transport without fear. It has to pay attention to last-mile transport and details, for example, with easy and ubiquitous access to bus maps and schedules. It must enforce construction regulations. After controlling pollution, it should encourage and facilitate cycling and walking in clement weather.
For now, we're paying for government and citizen apathy in the coin of choking children, diseased adults and reduced lifespans. Doctors can only advise patients with chronic respiratory distress to move out of Delhi and live elsewhere. Does this all sound like old hat? It bears repeating. If this is India's most developed city, then our development model targets life forms that do not depend on breathing oxygen. That this would be the world's very smallest vote bank should be as plain as the chronically allergic nose on your face.
This article has been modified.