This “hazardous” situation has emerged due to our inability to curb pollution from perennial sources, an air quality scientist told The Wire.

The toxic smog cloaking New Delhi in recent weeks has been smothering its 20 million or so residents with dangerous pollution but breathing life into debate about whether the city can remain India's capital.

As winter sets in across north India – usually around the time of the country’s biggest festival, Diwali – the air in Delhi becomes thick and brown with visible pollutants. To breathe in is to taste toxic fumes. The visibility is often so bad that famous monuments are reduced to smoky blurs on the horizon. It is, as one writer once put it, as if a burial shroud has cloaked the city.

Political deadlock, fragmented efforts and citizen apathy have led to the country’s pollution crisis

Most of India’s coal-burning plants are set to again fall short of a major pollution target, adding to the deadly smog that’s enveloped large parts of the country.

“An increase in PM 2.5 levels has occurred because all existing perennial sources of pollution haven’t been controlled in a systematic and comprehensive way. The base emissions load is already high so in episodic events, we can see this kind of spike,” explained Sunil Dahiya, founder and lead air quality analyst at Envirocatalysts.

Environmental advocates and public health experts criticised the apparent delay in implementing Stage-3 of the Graded Response Action Plan (GRAP), arguing that the Commission for Air Quality Management (CAQM) appears to have lost sight of its primary mission—to act pre-emptively before air emergencies arise, not after.

From October to the first week of November this year, PM2.5 and PM10 levels in Gurgaon were 45% and 77% lower than those in Delhi, respectively.