Every day is a bad-air day for Seema

What are these for,” Seema asked, scratching her head. She was looking at the two air purifiers I’d ordered as soon as I returned to a hideously polluted Delhi, after weeks of travelling. I explained what they were and she scoffed: “My grandmother always said that if the sun is shining, the air is clean.” How did I know anyway, she asked, that the air was dirty. I replied that dirty air may not be visible, but it had many visible manifestations. “Ever since I’ve come back, I’ve had a scratchy throat, blocked nose and have been sneezing continuously,” I said. To which she commented that perhaps people like me were more delicate than people like her. The comment stung, as I pride myself on being more resilient than most. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised that indeed she was right. People like Seema were truly surviving against all odds in the capital of India.

Let’s take a look at how Seema, and lakhs like her who live in Delhi’s unauthorised colonies, live: Seema lives in a single room with her husband and three adult children, in a building close to the floodplains of the Yamuna. “We are lucky our room has a window, even if it overlooks a busy road,” she said. “Many of my neighbours live in airless, windowless spaces.” Without a separate kitchen, Seema is forced to cook in the living space itself. Nobody has ever thought of measuring the ambient air quality inside the rooms like the one she inhabits — but I’m certain that even when the air outside is clean, the air inside rarely is.

Next, let us consider the water supply and sewage system in her neighbourhood. Seema’s family, like most of their neighbours, depended on illegal pumps to draw out groundwater for drinking and other daily needs. I wondered if anyone has measured the quality of groundwater so close to, what must be one of the world’s dirtiest rivers. Did they boil and filter the water before drinking it, I asked. “Sometimes,” she said. “Sometimes if there isn’t any boiled water left in the house, I drink straight from the tap.” Mostly, they filled water in bottles from their places of work.

As for sewage lines in her neighbourhood, Seema declared she didn’t know if any existed. Neither had she ever wondered where all the waste went. “Perhaps the shared toilets in our building are connected to a septic tank,” she said. In the 20 or so years that she had lived there, Seema had never seen evidence that they existed. “Actually, the shared toilets are so filthy that we try not to use them unless there’s an emergency.” She said the loos in a neighbouring building began overflowing a couple of years ago. “Since then, its residents have been usually ‘doing their job’ on the Yamuna banks. But on the positive side, they do pay a much lower rent than we do for their rooms.”

Talking with Seema made me realise that perhaps air purifiers and RO filters are cocooning people like us too much from the reality of how most Indians live. Perhaps protecting ourselves individually using these expensive appliances is making us — people who are most capable of making a noise and being heard — less likely to demand clean air, pure drinking water and unpolluted living environments as a universal human right. The truth is that the problem that we have been so hassled about since November 7 is something Seema and others like her face every day of the year... and that’s something to think about, isn’t it?