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.