India’s novel attempts at battling deadly air pollution are falling short

The smog tower, lined with double rows of fans, was intended to purify the surrounding area by sucking in smog, passing it through filters on the inside and releasing clean air. But the red-and-lime green contraption hasn’t worked for over a year.

“That’s so stupid," said college student Suhani Shrivastava, gesturing toward the tower as she walked by. “It doesn’t work and it doesn’t make any sense."

The 19-year-old said she is sick every winter with congested lungs and a sore throat. She blames the government for what she says is wasting taxpayer money on useless tools that don’t make a dent in the toxic air that afflicts one of the world’s most polluted cities.

“I feel like I’m taking in cancer," she said, between bouts of coughing. “It’s like the government has given up. They don’t care."

Delhi’s air quality declines sharply starting each October as farmers to the west of the capital set fires to clear crop stubble from their fields. Winds carry those particles to the city where they mix with emissions from vehicles, power plants and factories. Cooler temperatures prevent the polluted air from dispersing as it does in summer.

Experts said that government efforts to combat pollution, often announced with fanfare as winter approaches, have been ineffective and at times, downright silly.

The ruling party in Delhi, the Aam Aadmi Party, has deployed drones to monitor pollution hot spots and 200 mobile “antismog guns," which are vehicles mounted with water cannons that drive around the city misting the air. The idea is that the spray attaches to dust and other particles so they fall to the ground. It has also lobbied national authorities to be allowed to use artificial rain to clear the skies.

“Those are Band-Aid solutions, knee-jerk proposals to a grave situation," said Vimlendu Jha, an air-quality expert based in Delhi. “They don’t work."

Last month, a key measure of air pollution reached a level more than 100 times higher than the limits the World Health Organization considers safe on Nov. 18, according to calculations from the environmental think tank Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air.

Even many residents who typically shrug off the smog bemoaned the eye-popping pollution and scoffed at official efforts. Some reported that the air inside their offices and homes was hazy.

Yash Vardhan, a 26-year-old pharmacist, said he was splashed once by the spray from an antismog gun while trying to overtake the slow-moving truck on his scooter. He was mystified by the machine’s purpose until a friend explained that it was a pollution-fighting tool.

Vardhan said he gives the government some credit for deploying the smog guns.

“At least the government is trying to prove to people that they are doing something," he said. “But you’d have to be standing right by the gun to get any benefits."

The Delhi government said the smog guns and drones were part of emergency measures to combat pollution during winter months and that the country’s top court had ordered the construction of the smog tower.

It said it has taken several long-term steps, including closing local coal-fired power plants, shifting industries to cleaner fuel and dramatically expanding public transport through its metro system. The annual average level of fine particulate pollution has declined between 2015 and 2023, it said. But pollution generated from power plants, industry and farms in nearby areas beyond its administration counteracted its efforts.

“Just by the Delhi government trying to do more will not lead to higher outcomes," it said in a statement, adding that China and Mexico had successfully tackled pollution in their capitals because authorities there applied stringent policies across an affected region. “India is yet to take these kinds of measures."

Arvind Nautiyal, spokesman for the Commission for Air Quality Management, a central government body that coordinates pollution-control efforts for the capital and adjoining areas, said the agency has focused on reducing pollution at the source. Policies include encouraging farmers to reduce stubble burning by subsidizing the cost of machines that will mulch straw instead of burning it, requiring industries to switch to cleaner sources of fuel, and taking old cars off the street.

India has to weigh the requirements of public health, he added, versus the needs of a developing economy.

“Our economic scenario will not support any drastic action," he said.

From 2013 to 2021, according to the University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Institute, nearly 60% of the world’s increase in air pollution has come from India, which is seeking to speed up economic growth and lift incomes. India’s air-pollution problems extend well beyond Delhi.

But the capital’s problem is particularly striking, with air pollution there costing inhabitants—who include the country’s political elites—nearly eight years of life expectancy, according to the institute.

Apart from a few weeks, the bulk of Delhi’s pollution comes from year-round sources such as vehicle exhaust, construction dust and emissions from coal-fired power plants. Those activities raise the concentration of fine particulate matter that is especially harmful to the health because these tiny pollutants can penetrate deep into the lungs, increasing the risk of diseases such as asthma and lung cancer.

Environmental experts said India is failing to undertake the kind of difficult policy actions against these sources of pollution that eventually cleared the skies in Beijing, once the world’s poster child for smog-filled skies. China’s authoritarian government has stayed in power, in part, by acting swiftly to respond to public concerns, lest they boil into public unrest.

Between 2013 and 2022, the world’s second-largest economy improved air quality by 40%, as measured by levels of fine particulate matter, while the average life expectancy of residents increased by two years, according to Energy Policy Institute data.

China’s fight against air pollution began in the early 2010s, when an influential property tycoon, pointing to Beijing air-quality data published by the U.S. Embassy on Twitter, launched a social-media campaign that pressured the Chinese capital into being more transparent about pollution levels.

Public demands spread until the central government launched a “war on pollution"in 2014.The government curbed the amount of vehicles on the street, moved factories away from the city and installed pollution-mitigation technology in power plants. The policy had economic downsides, from closing factories and limiting other types of industrial activity around pollution hot spots.

India has yet to reckon with a wide-scale public outcry over pollution. That comes down to a variety of factors,including a low expectation of basic services from the government and a lack of education about the health risks of pollution, experts said.

The poorest people, who often work outside on construction sites or doing gig work, are also the most affected and have the least political sway. The rich can blunt the effects by working remotely, leaving the city or filling their homes with purifiers.

“Public consultation became very, very integral to Beijing’s management regime," said Jha, the air-quality expert. In contrast, “in India, we have a total lack of that urgency, that political will and desperation to solve this problem."

Environmental experts said that more and better data would be the biggest boost to India’s efforts against pollution, to precisely track sources of pollution and how well measures are working.

India launched a National Clean Air Program in 2019, but has installed only about 550 real-time air-quality monitoring stations spread out over more than 200 cities, according to official data. The country currently has about 930 manual monitoring stations, with sampling carried out a few times a week, which is still far less than the 1,500 such stations that India says it aims to install.

“There are many unmonitored places," said Manoj Kumar, an analyst at CREA. The only city with enough real-time monitors to adequately capture the state of pollution, he added, is New Delhi with about 40.

In China, thousands of monitoring devices were installed in plants and factories, providing publicly available hourly emissions data, and air quality became an important metric in evaluating the performance of local officials.

The lack of progress on air pollution hasn’t stopped political parties from seizing on the problem as a campaign issue for local elections next year in Delhi.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, which rules nationally but is in the opposition in the capital’s local government, has put up ads through the city subtly blaming the incumbent Aam Aadmi Party for failing to address the pollution problem.

One sidewalk poster depicts a sad-eyed man wearing a mask in front of a smoggy street full of traffic. “When the air you breathe is mixed with toxins," the ad says. “Is this my Delhi?"

A few blocks away, a banner in front of a shopping center boasted of AAP’s efforts to keep the city clean, including a photo of an antismog gun in action against a backdrop of yellow tulips.

Krishna Pokharel and Tripti Lahiri contributed to this article.

Write to Shan Li at shan.li@wsj.com