The Supreme Court’s flagellation of the Commission on Air Quality management on September 27 was fully deserved, but the real question remains; how is that, or anything else, including the Delhi’s government’s tired annual Winter Action Plan announced September 25, going to reduce air pollution peaks in the upcoming winter?

The signs are already ominous. After three months of “moderate” and “satisfactory” AQI levels and nearly a month of the cleanest air quality that New Delhi and most of north India has seen this year, air pollution rose sharply these past few days, foretelling impending annual peaks – and concomitantly increasingly harming the health of nearly half a billion Indians residing in the Indo-Gangetic plain.

The extended period of rains this year gave north Indians a slightly longer respite, but with the south-westerly monsoons receding now, it’s going to be back to the usual high PM2.5 levels that the landlocked Indo-Gangetic suffers through its toxic winters, year after year. Some air pollution scientists are even predicting that average pollution levels in the upcoming winter will be much worse than in previous years. But freak weather patterns of meteorology, temperatures, wind and humidity can change things unexpectedly, they add.

New Delhi saw AQI rise to 174 last week from under 50 after the last rain the week before. This number is increasing daily and crossed 360 earlier this week on a relatively cooler day with no rain and hardly any wind. Friday’s AQI was “poor” at 273 and Saturday was “very poor” at 303, according to the government’s SAFAR app.

India’s capital is seen as the ground zero of global air pollution because its levels of microscopic particulate matter is among the highest in the world. PM2.5 is so tiny that it is easily able to bypass the body’s natural defences and gets absorbed via the lungs into the bloodstream to reach and damage every organ. Exposure to this air pollution is equal to losing nearly twelve years of life expectancy, studies say. But experts have often pointed out that there are many areas in north India that are much more polluted than Delhi, but due to lack of precise measurement, slip under the radar.

The National Capital Region is the most closely measured and monitored compared to other urban centres with high population density. Continuous Ambient Air Quality Monitoring Stations (CAAQMS), among the most precise machines used to measure pollution, are expensive. India has roughly 374 monitors, roughly 11% of the 3,500 that are needed to cover the entire country, and most of these are mainly concentrated around........

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