Why India's Cities Keep Choking: The Unfinished Case for Airshed Governance

Every year around Diwali, a familiar ritual unfolds across north India. Air quality indices in Delhi, Noida, Gurugram and towns across Punjab and Haryana breach the "severe" threshold, schools shut for a few days, construction is paused on paper, and television anchors demand accountability from whoever is easiest to blame that week. By December, the wind changes, the numbers improve marginally, and the issue recedes from public attention until the next crisis. This has been the pattern for well over a decade, and it says less about the intractability of pollution science than about the mismatch between how air moves and how Indian governments are organised to act.

Air does not respect municipal or even state boundaries. The pollution that blankets Delhi in October and November is a mixture of vehicular and industrial emissions generated within the city, dust from construction and unpaved roads, and smoke drifting in from paddy stubble burnt across Punjab and Haryana, all trapped near the surface by the cooler, stiller air of late autumn. Yet the administrative response has historically been organised around the Delhi government, the Municipal Corporation, and neighbouring state governments acting largely within their own borders, coordinating only fitfully and often adversarially, particularly when the Centre and the Delhi government have been governed by rival parties.

The airshed idea and its promise

The creation of the Commission for Air Quality Management in the National Capital Region in 2021, replacing the earlier Environment Pollution (Prevention and Control) Authority, was meant to formalise something environmental scientists had argued for years: that Delhi's air quality could not be fixed by Delhi alone. The Commission was given statutory powers spanning Delhi, Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan, with the authority to issue binding directions, impose penalties, and coordinate the staggered rollout of the Graded Response Action Plan, which tightens restrictions on construction, vehicles and industry as pollution worsens.

On paper, this was a meaningful shift from a jurisdiction-bound model to something resembling airshed governance, the recognition that shared air requires shared management regardless of who governs which patch of land beneath it. In practice, the Commission has struggled against the same forces that undid its predecessor: limited enforcement capacity on the ground, resistance from state governments unwilling to cede authority over politically sensitive sectors such as agriculture and transport, and a Graded Response Action Plan that is fundamentally reactive, tightening restrictions once pollution has already turned hazardous rather than preventing it from getting there.

Stubble burning and the economics farmers actually face

No discussion of north Indian air pollution is complete without confronting stubble burning, and no discussion of stubble burning is complete without confronting the incentive structure that produces it. Punjab's paddy-wheat cropping cycle, itself a legacy of the Green Revolution and the minimum support price regime that made rice cultivation attractive even in a water-stressed state, leaves farmers a narrow window of two to three weeks between harvesting paddy and sowing wheat. Manual removal of stubble is labour-intensive and expensive; the Happy Seeder and similar machines that allow sowing without clearing residue remain costly and unevenly distributed despite years of subsidy schemes.

Successive governments have treated this largely as a compliance problem, imposing fines and threatening prosecution, when it is substantially an economics problem. A farmer choosing between an approaching sowing deadline, the cost of machinery rental, and the near-certainty that enforcement will be inconsistent is making a rational calculation, however damaging its downstream consequences. Schemes to compensate farmers for not burning stubble, or to build viable markets for paddy straw as biomass fuel or cattle fodder, have existed in pilot form for years but have never been scaled with the seriousness or the funding that the scale of the problem demands.

The urban half of the problem

It would be a mistake, however, to treat stubble burning as the primary villain, convenient as that framing is for Delhi's own administration. Studies by IIT Kanpur, TERI and the Centre-run SAFAR system have repeatedly shown that vehicular emissions, road dust, and industrial and construction activity contribute the bulk of Delhi's particulate pollution for most of the year, with stubble burning's contribution spiking sharply but briefly during the October-November window. Delhi's own record on public transport expansion, waste management, and construction dust control remains patchy. The city's much-publicised odd-even vehicle rationing scheme, tried multiple times since 2016, produced only marginal and short-lived air quality improvements according to independent analyses, suggesting it functioned more as visible political action than as effective policy.

This is where the strongest counter-argument to airshed critiques deserves acknowledgment: institutional redesign alone cannot substitute for the harder, less visible work of building metro and bus networks that actually reduce private vehicle dependence, enforcing construction dust norms without exception for politically connected builders, and modernising municipal solid waste processing so that open burning of garbage stops being a routine urban practice. The Commission for Air Quality Management, however well constituted, cannot conjure funded, credible mass transit into existence in the neighbouring states it oversees, nor can it force municipal corporations to fix delivery capacity that has eroded over decades of underinvestment.

What genuine airshed governance would require

A functioning airshed governance model would need three things India's current arrangement largely lacks. First, a permanent, well-resourced monitoring network dense enough to attribute pollution sources with confidence in near real time, rather than relying on retrospective satellite fire-count data that arrives too late to inform daily decisions. Second, enforcement authority that is genuinely insulated from the electoral incentives of the state governments whose farmers, industries and transport systems are being regulated, since no chief minister wants to be seen penalising constituents ahead of an election. Third, and most importantly, sustained multi-year investment in the underlying alternatives, machinery subsidies that actually reach smallholders, biomass supply chains that make stubble valuable rather than a nuisance to be burned, and urban transit systems that make owning a car in Delhi less necessary rather than merely less convenient two months a year.

None of this is beyond India's administrative capacity; it is a question of political will and time horizon. Pollution control in India suffers from what public health economists call the seasonality trap, treated as an emergency to be managed for eight weeks a year rather than a chronic condition to be addressed across a decade. The Commission for Air Quality Management represents a genuine, underappreciated institutional innovation in Indian federalism, an acknowledgment that some problems are shaped by geography rather than jurisdiction. Its underperformance to date is less an indictment of the airshed concept than a reminder that new institutions inherit the same old constraints unless they are given the resources and political cover to escape them. Until Delhi's winters stop being treated as a seasonal news event and start being treated as the visible tip of a year-round policy failure, the smog will keep returning, however many commissions are formed to greet it.