It is that time of year again when India’s national capital Delhi’s air quality turned acutely hazardous. Official Indian air quality indicators hit their maximum adverse readings of 500, while indices based on international norms shoot past 1,000 or even 2,000 —a level that effectively turned the city into a gas chamber. The thick smog, loaded with toxic gases, seeps into every corner of the city, including inside people’s homes, with residents having nowhere safe to go.
Winter, not just in Delhi, but across the Indo-Gangetic plains, which house nearly half the country’s population, has become increasingly toxic in the past decade and more. While emissions from vehicles are a major contribution to the hazardous air, firewood use in rural households for cooking and heating, paddy-stubble burning after the Kharif harvest (October–November), and industrial pollution, smoke from brick kilns, open incineration of garbage, together produce huge quantity of pollutants that remained trapped above the ground for prolonged periods in winters.
The winter conditions on the northern plains —low temperatures, high atmospheric moisture, weak winds, and the Himalayan barrier— create a stable inversion layer that prevents the dispersion of pollutants. The result is a persistent blanket of smog over cities and towns of the region, broken only by occasional days of showers in January that provide relief for very brief periods.
While toxic air in winters is far more geographically pervasive, covering multiple states of northern India, the pollution in Delhi attracts much attention, due to it being the seat of the country's political, administrative, judicial and media elite —whose privileged spaces are not spared of the toxic air. In fact, winter pollution in some of these smaller cities and towns is worse than in Delhi, but their plight rarely registers in the media.
The hazardous winter pollution has created a serious health crisis, with rise in respiratory illnesses, higher rates of hypertension and cancer, cognitive decline in children, greater disease burden overall, and increased mortality among both the elderly and infants. Its impact is most severe on the bottom 90 percent of the population, who face an underfunded public health system, cannot afford or access adequate care, and for whom illness means lost wages and costly medical visits and tests that push them even further into poverty.
Identifying the core causes of pollution and addressing the health crisis, without placing the cost of prevention on the most vulnerable —the working class and the peasantry— is an urgent task for the Indian government
But the Indian government, instead of formulating a comprehensive plan to tackle the pollution crisis, has shifted the blame onto farmers in Haryana, Punjab, and Uttar Pradesh —treating post-harvest stubble burning as the primary cause of Delhi’s toxic air and pushing states to impose heavy fines on cultivators, ranging from Rs 5,000 to Rs 30,000.
Increasing Automobiles – The Main Culprit
In reality, the biggest driver of Delhi’s pollution is the rising ownership and use of automobiles. Studies estimate that more than half of the city’s air pollution comes from vehicular emissions. This is hardly surprising, given that Delhi has more cars than the next three biggest Indian cities—Mumbai, Kolkata, and Chennai —combined, and 90 percent of them are private vehicles.
It’s not just Delhi. Rising car ownership among the top decile has made road congestion and heavy pollution routine even in semi-urban areas in India, that once had relatively clean air.
Car ownership and road transportation have been placed at the centre of India’s neoliberal growth model. With the push toward privatisation, successive governments have deliberately weakened the less-polluting public transportation system, including the railways. State-owned Indian Railways has been left with ageing, overstretched infrastructure: its share of freight transportation has collapsed from around 60 percent in 1991 to about 29 percent today, and its passenger share has fallen in parallel
As rail capacity stagnated, road transportation —especially the use of personal and commercial vehicles— was allowed to expand unchecked. The automobile sector now accounts for roughly half of manufacturing value added. It has been propped up by the rapid expansion of the road network, even as public road transport has been left to decay: state road transport undertakings, which provide mass public transit, have been chronically neglected. While the number of cars, jeeps, and taxis has grown at a compound annual rate of 8.56 percent, the number of buses —the mainstay of public road transport— has increased by only 2.48 percent.
Over the past few decades, the Union government has poured a disproportionate share of its capital expenditure into road construction, to encourage an automobile-centric economy. India now has one of the largest road networks in the world —out of sync with its geography and population density— and it continues to expand rapidly while the railway system stagnates. India’s total road length even exceeds China’s, despite China having a comparable population, three times the land area, and a far larger economy. By contrast, India’s railway route length has stagnated: the two countries had roughly the same route length around 2010, but India’s has grown by only about 6 percent in the two decades since, while China’s has expanded by roughly 65 percent over the same period and is now about 60 percent longer than India’s.
Poverty and Pollution
If affluence drives pollution at one end, the skewed, trickle-down pattern of India’s economic growth leaves millions of families still dependent on collected firewood for household energy and forces much of the peasantry to resort to stubble burning. The limited economic growth that trickles down gives them little capacity to adopt alternatives. This, too, worsens air quality
It is estimated that about 30 percent of pollution in north Indian winters is caused by the burning of biomass - wood and dung used for daily cooking and winter heating, along with stubble burning in late October and November.
Government schemes intended to help households shift from firewood to LPG remain underfunded, making the transition too expensive for much of rural India, where firewood collected by women continues to be a major energy source. With electric heating simply out of reach for the majority, open fires remain the main source of winter heating in rural north India —and even for migrant workers in the cities.
Are the peasants at fault?
The smoke from stubble burning in mid-October to November adds a temporary spike to an already high baseline of winter pollution generated by motor vehicles and other sources. Indian media seizes on this spike as the main culprit. Yet pollution levels remain just as severe through December and January —long after stubble burning has stopped— making it clear that the primary drivers of toxic air in Delhi and the wider region are the persistent sources, above all motor vehicles.
In the years 2023, Delhi had just a single day where the air quality was shown to be good. In 2024, Delhi did not have a single day of good air quality. All this can not be due to stubble burning which is limited to a month in winter.
Unwilling to confront the core issue of vehicular pollution —which would require abandoning its prioritisation of private road transport over cheaper public alternatives— the government has instead chosen to target farmers.
It is a fact that stubble burning worsens air quality. Farmers are not unaware of this; the smoke chokes their own villages before it ever reaches cities like Delhi. But with narrow margins and declining state support, the peasantry lacks workable alternatives. If stubble isn’t cleared quickly, the sowing of the Rabi crop is delayed, disrupting the entire crop cycle. Climate change has made this worse. For the past five to six years, the southwest monsoon has been arriving late in north India. June, once the normal sowing month, is now too dry, pushing sowing into July and shifting the Kharif harvest deeper into winter. At times the monsoon even lingers into October —as it did this year— so paddy ready for harvest gets drenched and must stand in the field for extra weeks to dry, delaying the harvest. As a result, there is little time after Kharif paddy for crop residue to decompose naturally before fields must be prepared for Rabi wheat.
In India where the majority of the peasants are small and marginal, who barely break even, it is the government's responsibility to invest in technologies and develop crop varieties suited to the changing climate. Instead, the Indian state has been trying to withdraw even the limited support that exists, which is largely restricted to MSP (Minimum Support Price) for paddy and wheat. (The government has been trying to do away with MSP and fully hand agricultural markets to corporates, which resulted in historic farmers agitation in 2020-21).
The government frequently urges farmers to diversify into different crops to conserve water, to adjust to climate change, to withstand market vagaries, and so on,but offers no meaningful price support for alternative crops, invests little in new varieties and agricultural technologies, leaving it to agribusinesses, thereby making crop diversification unviable for farmers.
Rather than invest in technologies to manage crop residue and provide the financial support needed for farmers to adopt them, the government has chosen to impose heavy fines on an already strained peasantry while encouraging a steady stream of negative media coverage that paints farmers as the primary culprits of pollution. This framing serves a political purpose: it erodes public sympathy for farmers and lays the groundwork for future legislation that favours corporate interests seeking greater control over agriculture.
The scapegoating of farmers for pollution serves a dual purpose for the corporates whose interests the Indian state actively promotes. It lays the groundwork for a future push to corporatise agriculture by portraying farmers’ ‘backward practices’ as in need of modernisation. It also diverts attention from the real culprits —the automobile industry, the rise in private vehicle use, and the systematic neglect of public transport.
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This article was produced by Globetrotter. Bodapati Srujana works in the area of agrarian relations in India, having participated in several studies around the country. She often writes on issues in the Indian Economy
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