“There are not enough masks in the world to make this air breathable”
“Suffocating” fog ushers in Delhi’s pollution season every year. The absence of policies to combat air pollution levels continues to make Delhi the most polluted city in the world.
It was to respond to the inaction of successive governments that, last Sunday, the Indian capital was the scene of a protest for the right to breathe safely. This is at a time when the Air Quality Index (AQI) already records numbers 100 times above what is considered safe by global health entities. “Delhi is no longer a liveable city, it is a death trap,” says Radhika Aggarwal, one of the protesters, via The Guardian.
Currently, pollution kills more than obesity or diabetes in the city and many residents compare Delhi to “a gas chamber”: “As I stand here, I know I’m breathing air that is killing me and we see nothing more than a failure of the government to do anything to stop it. No policies, no real action, so I’m here to fight for my city.”
In the days before the protest, which was supposed to take place peacefully, the activists were subjected to pressure to cancel the gathering, and were even threatened with legal action.
Saurav Das, a 26-year-old protester, stressed that the idea was always to gather “peacefully” at India Gate, “to send a loud and clear message” to the government, whose “apathy and failed policies have failed to combat air pollution”.
Instead, “we were met with unnecessary brute force,” he said, after authorities detained nearly 100 protesters and closed the site to prevent the protest.
On posters held up during the protest, protesters wrote messages of despair and calls for government action. “Breathing is killing me”, read one of them. Sofie was one of the residents who decided to join the protest and guarantees that “there are not enough masks in the world to make this air breathable”. “I can’t go for a walk without getting a terrible headache,” he added.
Another protester cited by the Guardian has no doubt that “any other city that was breathing this air would have already declared a health emergency”.
At the root of the problem is a lethal mix of emissions from tens of millions of cars, power plants and gases released by fires.
The main target of the protest was the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which in February won the elections and formed a new government, giving residents hope that a new anti-pollution political agenda would be defined at a national level. The current Executive blamed the previous government for the scale of the problem, but has not yet presented significant measures to combat pollution, having already been accused of falsifying the city’s pollution data.
