Something in the Air
As New Delhi overtakes Beijing as the most polluted city on earth, its citizens are fighting to breathe.
The city of New Delhi is choking, and there’s no end—or much else—in sight. Although residents of the Indian capital are used to polluted air, particularly in the cooler months when people light their stoves for heat, this winter it reached a level that even Delhiites could not have prepared for. In November, after six days of heavy smog smothering the city, the Indian government declared an emergency, temporarily closing schools, construction sites and coal-fired power stations. The hashtag #myrighttobreathe trended on Twitter, as citizens called for government action.
Things had deteriorated quickly after October, when thousands of farmers in the nearby state of Punjab burned straw left over from their rice harvests, blowing smoke toward Delhi. At the end of the month, during the Hindu festival of Diwali, residents set off celebratory firecrackers against the advice of the government, making the pollution even worse. The day after Diwali, photojournalist and Delhi resident Zacharie Rabehi said the smog was so dense that “I couldn’t see my hand at the end of my arm.”
He wasn’t imagining it. In 2016, the number of heavy particulates in the air was so high in Delhi that they were impossible to measure using everyday instruments. Quietly, Delhi has surpassed the place we all think of as ‘smog city’—beijing. A recent study from the Health Effects Institute found the number of premature deaths caused by pollution in India has risen by 150 percent over the last 25 years. And according to a 2015 study by the Chittaranjan
National Cancer Institute, 4.4 million of Delhi’s school children have reduced lung capacity and would never recover.
French photographer Rabehi, whose pictures can be seen on these pages, has lived in India for 10 years, documenting humanitarian crises and social issues. This winter, Rabehi turned his lens on Delhi’s pollution, photographing landfill sites, rivers, and roads, blurry in the graying air. Rabehi said he wanted to show “not just the air, and the smog, but the water, and the impact on people too. I wanted to document the repetition of this problem across the city.”
Nearly a third of Delhi’s pollution is caused by vehicle exhaust from diesel engines, and the rest by road dust kicked up into the air, or by burning biomass from stoves that heat homes. Landfills in Delhi, which act as a substitute for trash disposal and are reportedly growing by 8,000 tons a day, are also making the situation worse as piles of debris burn, releasing toxic smoke. For his project, Rabehi snuck into the 70-acre Ghazipur landfill on the back of a truck. “There were animals everywhere: birds and hundreds of dogs, all digging through the waste.”
Rabehi also wanted to capture the effects on the city’s most vital water source. The Yamuna River, a branch of the Ganges that runs through Delhi’s center, is the most polluted waterway in India. Rabehi’s photographs show the river lined with thick white and blue chemical foam, like the remnants of a giant bubble bath with plastic and trash floating down it.
Although the government introduced measures in November to cut pollution, including sprinkling water on dusty roads to suppress the particles, and prohibiting the burning of leaves, it may be too late. With air pollution killing two people in India every minute, the human toll is nothing short of breathtaking.