‘Fireworks’ over air pollution chokes India

“Pollution is not the price of progress. It is the result of failure to prevent it.”

— The Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health

Every winter, India wakes up coughing. The smog arrives on schedule, like a festival of neglect. Buildings fade behind a brown-grey haze, schools delay morning assemblies, and parents whisper the same anxious question: “Should the children play outside today?” Meanwhile, our leaders are busy lighting their own kind of ‘fireworks’ — loud, performative political pyrotechnics designed to dazzle, distract, and drown out accountability.

This is not about Diwali.

This is about the politics of distraction.

Every year, the script hardly changes.

Blame Punjab. Blame Haryana. Blame Delhi. Blame the farmers. Blame diesel SUVs and finally, blame the weather.

Anyone and anything — except the systems that produce this crisis.

The science is not disputed. The health impacts are not speculative. Air pollution kills, silently and steadily. Almost every Indian — 99 per cent of the population — breathes air unsafe by medical standards. This is not just Delhi’s burden. Mumbai, Kolkata, Lucknow, Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad — all routinely cross what pediatricians consider danger thresholds of PM2.5.

In simple words:Breathing in India has become a health risk.

And that health risk does not merely mean cough, cold or temporary discomfort. Research links long-term exposure to reduced lung function, chronic asthma, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and developmental impacts in children. A child growing up in Delhi or Kanpur has lung capacity 10–20 per cent lower than a child growing up in cleaner environments. This is not a statistic — it is a stolen future.

Yet, the political discourse remains stuck in seasonal theatrics.

Yes, stubble burning contributes to the winter spike. But to pretend it is the cause of India’s air crisis is to confuse a matchstick with a forest fire.

Farmers didn’t choose to burn fields because they enjoy the smoke. They are trapped in a procurement-driven paddy-wheat cycle that leaves them barely days to clear fields before the next crop. Residue-management machines like Happy Seeders and Super Straw systems exist — but they are expensive, unevenly supplied, and often unavailable exactly when needed.

l Burning is fast.

l Burning is cheap.

l Burning is survival.

So, when leaders stand on grand stages and thunder about “strict action” against farmers, it is the poorest being scapegoated for a crisis engineered by decades of distorted agricultural and energy policy.

Meanwhile, the major contributors remain largely untouched:

l Congested private vehicle fleets and diesel exhaust

l Coal power plants operating near dense urban populations

l Industrial clusters with weak emission enforcement

l Open garbage burning and municipal waste failures

l Construction dust rising like a permanent fog

These require governing, not grandstanding.

So, the ‘fireworks’ continue.

This year again, the Centre accused Punjab of failure. Punjab accused the Centre of withholding funds. Haryana pointed across the border. Delhi blamed the wind. Rajasthan shrugged. Uttar Pradesh recorded more stubble fires than before, quietly. And TV newsrooms, as always, converted it all into sound-and-fury entertainment.

And the inconvenient truth remained unspoken:

Haryana’s own pollution inventory shows industrial emissions and construction dust form the majority of particulate load, not stubble. Rajasthan’s expanding towns add soot to natural desert dust. Uttar Pradesh is becoming the next burning hotspot. These conclusions exist in government documents — but not in government speeches. While leaders trade barbs, paediatric wards tell the real story. In hospitals from Delhi to Jaipur to Ludhiana, children sit with nebulisers, breathing through machines instead of lungs. Paediatricians now speak casually of reduced lung capacity in schoolchildren. Outdoor sports are now air-quality-dependent privileges.

We once measured childhood by height and weight.

Now we measure it by how early the inhaler arrives.

The “Vishwaguru” cannot ensure breathable air for its youngest citizens.

The government’s flagship National Clean Air Programme (NCAP) was launched with great fanfare in 2019 to reduce particulate matter by 20–30 per cent by 2024. Then the deadline quietly moved. Targets shifted. Benchmarks blurred. Reports softened. The typical Indian governance trajectory: announce, applaud, forget.

This is not merely environmental decline. This is governance failure — of enforcement, planning, investment, and political will. The solutions have been known for years:

l Enforce emission caps on industry and power plants

l Expand reliable public transport and reduce private vehicle dependency

l Control construction dust through strict site compliance

l Provide crop-residue machinery at actual scale, not token schemes

l Stop open waste burning with decentralized waste systems

l Eliminate diesel generator reliance through grid stability

l Make real-time air-quality and emissions data public and binding

None of this is complicated.

We landed a spacecraft on the Moon.

But we still “cannot” control dust on our roads?

Technology is not the barrier.

Political cost is.

Because real enforcement means someone powerful is inconvenienced:

a contractor, a builder, a transport union, a coal supplier, a procurement nexus.

And so outrage becomes theatre, theatre becomes news, news becomes distraction.

Smog → Outrage → Blame → Silence → Repeat.

And we must also acknowledge the ecological consequences of our fireworks culture. Radar studies in Europe have documented thousands of birds taking panicked flight during fireworks, burning energy and sometimes dying from exhaustion or collisions. Animals interpret sudden explosions and flashes as threats.

Closer home

In April 2024, around a dozen flamingos at Navi Mumbai’s DPS Lake were found injured — many later died — disoriented by intense LED glare near their landing zone.

If streetlights alone can kill, imagine what explosive light-and-smoke storms do to fragile ecosystems.

We have become a nation of events, not a nation of outcomes.

So the next time the haze settles and the AQI hits “Severe”, instead of asking:

“Who burst firecrackers?”

Ask instead:

l “Who benefits when nothing changes?”

l What good is GDP growth if it comes with damaged lungs?

l What good are bullet trains if children cannot run?

l What good is development if the air itself is unfit to breathe?

l India does not need more slogans.

l India needs oxygen.

The moment citizens stop applauding political fireworks and start demanding clean air —that is the moment the smog will finally begin to lift.

(The columnist is a Mumbai-based author and independent media veteran, running websites and a youtube channel known for his thought-provoking messaging.)