Delhi is engulfed by pollution. Why aren’t all wearing masks?
SOME SEE NO POINT IN WEARING ONE DESPITE EVER-WORSENING AIR QUALITY
Agreyish haze filled the park as the yoga practitioners gathered for their daily exercise early Thursday morning. Anywhere else the haze might have been fog or mist, but Delhiites know better: For the second time in as many weeks, the smog was so severe that the city took the emergency step of closing schools.
But the yoga devotees saw no reason to stay home — and no reason to wear anti-pollution masks. “I’ll look like a fool if I wear a mask,” said R.L. Khattar, a 92-year-old resident of a nearby lower-income neighbourhood, prompting laughter from the others. Delhi’s bad air had given him a recurring cough and feelings of breathlessness. But a mask makes Khattar feel “claustrophobic.”
Standing nearby, Prem Gupta, 52, concurred. No one in his family wears a mask, including his children. “Pollution won’t stop if you wear a mask, so what’s the point?” he asked.
Despite living with some of the world’s worst air, very few residents of India’s capital wear anti-pollution masks, which can filter the vast majority of harmful particles if worn correctly. The paucity of such masks stands in stark contrast to cities such as Beijing, another megacity known for acute smog, where it is not unusual to see people wearing them.
Lack of awareness
The reasons people in Delhi are reluctant to wear masks are complex. For many of the city’s poorer residents, even the cheapest disposable pollution mask, which costs around $1.25 (Dh4.6) may be prohibitive. But other factors are also at play, including a lack of awareness of the health risks posed by air pollution. Even those who know the dangers say masks are uncomfortable, socially awkward or inadequate to the enormity of the problem.
Now there are signs that such attitudes are beginning to shift. This year, for the first time, the Delhi state government announced that it would distribute five million anti-pollution masks to students across the city. The masks — dark grey with red adjustable straps — began arriving in schools at the start of the month. Disposable pollution masks are showing up at small general stores, companies have offered them as part of sales promotions, and some employers are giving them to their staff.
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“For the first time ever, people are dialled in and listening,” said Jai Dhar Gupta, 47, a businessman who distributes the Vogmask brand in India. He said that he had sold more than 100,000 masks this year, exhausting the company’s India inventory and forcing them to get stock from China.
Still, mask wearers remain the exception. On Wednesday, as the city’s air quality began to deteriorate once again, legal journalist Murali Krishnan wrote on Twitter that he was standing in a corridor of the Supreme Court wearing a pollution mask and drawing stares. “Hello, I should be staring at people for not wearing a mask,” he wrote.
Shikha Adlakha, the mother of two daughters in Delhi’s state schools, said that the local government had taken a good step by distributing masks to students. But her eighth-grader doesn’t find hers comfortable and wears it only when her mother is around. Adlakha said her younger daughter, who is in second grade, does wear her mask, as “she listens to me [and] thinks wearing it is cool.”
Researchers at the University of Chicago conducted surveys around mask-wearing behaviour among 3,500 of Delhi’s poorest residents. They found that the awareness of the harm pollution causes is still relatively low and that social norms may discourage people from wearing masks.
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