SHIVANI SINGH

With festivities and a nip in the air, October was once the best month to be in Delhi. Today, of course, it is dreaded as the grim harbinger of the smog season.

Around the time we celebrate Dussehra, the city sky turns soot grey, the air starts smelling of burnt paper and the spiralling air quality index becomes the top news headline. Despite the recent restrictions on firecrackers, many residents now leave Delhi to escape the Diwali blitzkrieg that smothers an already choking city.

Under Delhi’s Graded Response Action Plan to fight air pollution, mitigation measures range from spraying water on unpaved roads and penalising garbage burning to raising parking fees, halting construction work, shutting down polluting factories, power plants, and limiting cars on roads.

While Grap was meant to be a year-long exercise to check polluting activities even when the air is “moderately” clean, we have reduced it to a calendar event to be observed when winter pollution peaks.

But ad hoc firefighting after having stoked the fire round the year is not a winning strategy. To curb air pollution, Delhi must stop treating it as a seasonal problem.

Our business-as-usual creates enough pollution round the year to keep the baseline very high. During the nonwinter months, Delhi gets by due to favourable weather conditions. But freak weather buildups can easily shatter that illusion of comfort. Remember the dust storm this summer that added to the city’s pollutants, pushing the AQI levels to the severe zone? Yet we wait for the winter to be reminded that Delhi has