Clearing the Smoke & Mirrors: Getting to the Bottom of Delhi’s Air Pollution

About the Lecture

In late October, Mumbai's AQI crossed 320 while Delhi sat at 176, its cleanest reading for that date in a decade. So what does it mean when the capital is breathing easier than the coast?

Not much, if you ask the people who study this. A single day's AQI is a weather report as much as a pollution report, and one clean week in Delhi is not a solved problem any more than one bad week in Mumbai is a new one. But the comparison is useful, because it puts pressure on the assumption most of us carry around: that this is a Delhi problem, caused by Delhi things, fixable by Delhi alone.

We've all done the winter ritual. Complaining about the AQI, feeling what the air does to our lungs, sleep, skin and routines. Every year we're handed the same list of culprits: stubble burning, construction dust, industrial emissions, cars, trucks, garbage fires, landfills, brick kilns, diesel generators and, of course, the wind. The panels shout, the season passes, and by next November we're no clearer on which of these actually matters, or by how much.

Atmospheric scientist Dr Mohammad Rafiuddin starts with the hand Delhi has been dealt: a landlocked city on the Indo-Gangetic Plain, hemmed in by the Himalayas, with winter air that sits still. It's a bad hand, but not a unique one, and if cities elsewhere with the same conditions have got their air under control, so can this one. From there we go sector by sector through what is actually in the air we breathe, which sources genuinely move the needle, and why the answer never stops at Delhi's border.

The session explores:

• Why a daily AQI number tells you as much about the weather as about pollution
• How Delhi's geography and winter stillness trap what we put into the air, and why that isn't an excuse
• What's actually in the air, sector by sector: transport, biomass and solid-fuel burning, waste, dust, construction, industry and stubble
• Which sources matter most, by how much, and which solutions would genuinely cut emissions from each

About the Speaker

Dr Mohammad Rafiuddin is an atmospheric scientist who once built a fog-forecasting system for Bengaluru airport, which means pilots have landed on his maths. He is now Programme Lead – Clean Air at CEEW, where he researches what Delhi's air is made of, how well the city can predict it, and why the answer never stops at Delhi's border.

He holds a PhD in atmospheric sciences from the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bengaluru, a Post Graduate Diploma in Urban Environmental Management and Law from National Law University, and a BTech in mechanical engineering from Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University, Hyderabad.

About unLecture

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