Many parents in Delhi are living with anxiety fueled by their inability to escape the city due to work and other commitments, and the situation in the Indian capital’s slums is even worse. Deepak Kumar has a one-year-old daughter with respiratory problems and guarantees that a visit to the doctor costs more than his daily salary: “I was born and raised here, I feel comfortable here, so creating another home there will not be easy, but we have no choice”
As pollution worsens in India’s capital, parents face an impossible choice: stay or leave.
Amrita Rosha, 45, is among those who chose to flee with her children. Both – four-year-old Vanaaya and nine-year-old Abhiraj – suffer from respiratory problems due to increased pollution and require medication.
“We have no option but to leave Delhi,” Rosha, a housewife married to a businessman, explained to CNN last month from her home in an affluent neighborhood in South Delhi, as she packed her bags. last hour before leaving for the Gulf State of Oman.
Every year for the past decade, a blanket of smog envelops Delhi as winter approaches, turning day into night and disrupting the lives of millions of people. Some of them, especially young children with less developed immune systems, are forced to seek medical care due to respiratory problems.
Rosha makes sure her children receive the best healthcare — including doctor appointments, vaporizers, inhalers and steroids — and trips outside of Delhi to escape the suffocating air.
Amrita Rosha with her children Vanaaya, 4, and Abhiraj, 9, in their bungalow in South Delhi. Aishwarya S Iyer/CNN
While wealthy families like the Roshas can escape, it’s a different story for those who don’t have the means to leave.
About 15 miles away, in a Delhi slum, Muskan, who goes by his first name, looks worriedly at the drops of medicine left in his children’s nebulizer, a machine that turns liquid medicine into a fine mist to be inhaled through a face mask or mouthpiece.
The mother rations its use because it is difficult for her to buy more.
“We give half (the dosage) of the medicines to our children,” she says, referring to three-year-old Chahat and one-year-old Diya. They have been on foggers since their first winters, as soon as they were born.
Muskan bought the nine-dollar (8.63 euro) nebulizer after weeks of hard work on the streets. She makes a living by picking up rags and other bits of trash, and her husband is a day laborer.
“When they cough, I’m afraid my children will die. I am filled with remorse, because I keep worrying about the possibility of something terrible happening to them”, she recalls.
Muskan holds his daughter Diya while his 3-year-old son Chahat uses the nebulizer. “He thinks it’s a toy,” she said, as he easily puts it on himself. Aishwarya S Iyer/CNN
Leave Delhi
The suffering of Delhi’s children, year after year, has become impossible to ignore.
“Children are having to resort to steroids and inhalers to breathe… the entire north of India has been pushed into a medical emergency,” said Delhi Chief Minister Atishi, who uses her first name.
The Supreme Court has intervened to control measures introduced to reduce pollution, which is generally caused by a combination of factors including vehicle emissions, crop burning and construction work, along with unfavorable climate and weather conditions.
Measures adopted include bans on car circulation, demolitions and construction works, as well as spraying roads with water. Authorities also increased public transport and cracked down on fires.
Despite these measures, Delhi remains India’s most polluted city in November in eight years, according to the Center for Energy and Clean Air Research.
Manjinder Singh Randhawa, a doctor in the pediatric intensive care unit at Rainbow Children’s Hospital, explains that this year he has diagnosed younger children with asthma in a “very critical condition” for the first time.
In the long term, pollution can have a serious impact on the respiratory, immune and cardiovascular systems, he added.
CNN contacted the central and state governments, as well as the Air Quality Management Commission, which is responsible for maintaining air quality in the region.
In some parts of Delhi last month, pollution levels exceeded 1,750 on the Air Quality Index, according to IQAir, which monitors the . Any value above 300 is considered a health hazard.
During those weeks, levels of pollution by PM 2.5, smaller particles that can penetrate deep into the lungs, reached more than 70 times the health limits set by the World Health Organization. This week, the level was more than 20 times top. that inhaling PM 2.5 can cause cognitive disorders in children.
An expensive escape
Some parents, like Deepthi Ramdas, prioritized their children’s health and moved years ago. When his son Rudra was born three years ago, he didn’t think he would ever leave Delhi. But, that changed when she saw him admitted to a pediatric intensive care unit in January 2022.
Doctors told her that she had to leave Delhi if she wanted her son’s lungs to develop, recalls Deepthi. As he had family in the state of Kerala, in the south of the country, he decided to leave.
“It was not an easy decision. I had to leave my job, which I loved… and since my husband had to stay in Delhi for work… we started having a long-distance marriage,” she says.
Deepthi Ramdas’ son was hospitalized when he was less than a year old, in 2022. “We keep this as a souvenir to remember one of his worst moments,” she said. Deepthi Ramdas
But Deepthi feels relieved knowing that Rudra did not have any breathing problems in Kerala. They visited Delhi in the first week of December to meet their father. “We expected that since he is now three years old, his lungs would be stronger, but within a few days Rudra had a seizure and was back on nebulizers,” says Deepthi.
“Looking at him like that was heartbreaking. There is no way I am going back to Delhi”, he guarantees, sharing photos of Rudra, from when he was in the hospital in 2022 to when he was playing outdoors in Kerala, in October.
Anxiety in the air
Many parents in Delhi are living under anxiety fueled by their inability to escape the city due to work and other commitments.
“This is not something you do just like that, you have to plan and be lucky,” mother Urvee Parasramka, 29, tells CNN. Her two-year-old daughter Reva has been using nebulizers since her first winter.
When Urvee was pregnant, she remembers her husband, Prateek Tulsyan, responding to news about pollution by saying he would make sure there were enough air purifiers in the house to protect the child. However, nine months after giving birth, Reva had her first attack.
“At that point, there was a lot of panic. It was difficult to understand why she needed such heavy medication. I was very scared. It took me some time to recover”, says Prateek to CNN.
Urvee added, “I am constantly checking her temperature, I don’t let her go out or eat anything that could aggravate her condition. Now I’m an overprotective father.”
If you hear Reva sneeze, you know a cough is coming, followed by congestion and then the need to use the nebulizer.
Urvee says they decided to move to Guwahati in northeast India, where the air quality is better, during the high pollution months next year.
“I was born and raised here, I feel comfortable here, so creating another home there will not be easy, but we have no choice,” he says.
No way out
Muskan and his neighbors in the Delhi slum are not so lucky.
You run to the shared nebulizer when your children have symptoms like chest pain, coughing or vomiting. She says that the children themselves ask for it and that they use it with precision and practice. But not everyone has the possibility of having the machine at home.
Some of their neighbors rush to the nearest private clinic and pay around 80 rupees or a dollar for each treatment.
One of them is Deepak Kumar, an employee with four children. Their youngest and only daughter, one-year-old Kripa, is using a nebulizer for the second winter season in a row since her birth.
Deepak Kumar holds his 1-year-old daughter Kripa, for whom he had to go into debt to pay for urgent medical expenses. “If I put her down, she starts crying,” he said. Aishwarya S Iyer/CNN
“The doctor asked us to buy it, but we don’t have that money”, he says.
A visit to the doctor costs more than your daily salary.
The nights are the worst. When doctors aren’t available, she relies on balms and steam to help her daughter get through the night. Even when she is sleeping well, the mounting debt due to medical expenses keeps her from sleeping.
“Yes, I have a debt of 20,000 rupees (235 dollars) and to pay it off I am trying to work even harder”, he says.
Many like Kumar have come to Delhi from different parts of India looking for a better life, but are stuck.
“It shouldn’t be so difficult to live in the capital”, says Deepak Kumar.
