Residents of smog-hit Delhi flee the city for winter
INDIA: In the days of the Raj, parched Britons fled Delhi in summer, heading north to the Himalayan foothills to escape the baking heat of the plains. Today it is winter that spurs an exodus from the capital.
Diwali, the festival of lights, should be the most joyous date in the Hindu calendar, marking the triumph of good over evil. In Delhi, however, the festival has come to mark the onset of the worst air pollution on the planet.
Millions of firecrackers mix into the smog generated by power plants, dust from construction sites, farmers burning arable waste in neighbouring states and the fumes from millions of cars to create a sulphurous fug that can sit over the capital and much of northern India for months.
A recent study found that pollution in Delhi was so bad that residents would live almost six years longer if India met its own air quality standards and up to nine years more if it met international benchmarks.
Preparations to get away for Diwali and the winter now begin months in advance, with the sunshine state of Goa and its beaches and wooded hills an increasingly popular bolt hole.
Expatriates with children face a starker choice. Many have upped sticks altogether, no longer able to justify the cost to their children’s health of staying in the capital.
Nicola and Richard reluctantly abandoned the city this year after two of their children developed asthma. For all its charms, however, Goa is too remote for most employers.
Richard now spends the week in Delhi – living with a flatmate for the first time since the mid-1990s to share the rent – and ‘‘commutes’’ to Goa and back at weekends.
An increasing number of others are in the same position, paying double rents at opposite ends of the country and shouldering the time and cost of flights in and out of the capital.
‘‘It’s this or leave the country, really. It wasn’t fair on the children,’’ said Sarah, another Briton whose family has decamped from Delhi to Bangalore.
No end is in sight. Delhi has been left choking on the fumes of political and administrative failure. Piecemeal initiatives by local government and the courts, including a ban on the sale of firecrackers over Diwali this year, have done little to ease the problem.
Real change would require Delhi and neighbouring states to combat pollution in unison; a near impossibility, as several are controlled by rival parties. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Narendra Modi, which governs states around the capital, has no interest in handing a huge political victory to Arvind Kejriwal, Delhi’s eccentric chief minister, who loathes Modi.
Delhiites fear that concerted action will come only if Modi wins re-election in 2019 and the BJP takes back control of the capital the following year.
For many considering their future in the city, however, that will be too late, and they have already made their choice.
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