NEW DELHI: Confined to her family’s ramshackle shanty by the toxic smog choking India’s capital, Harshita Gautam strained to hear her teacher’s instructions over a cheap mobile phone borrowed from her mother.

The nine-year-old is among nearly two million students in and around New Delhi told to stay home after authorities once again ordered schools to shut because of worsening air pollution.

Now a weary annual ritual, keeping children at home and moving lessons online for days at a time during the peak of the smog crisis in winter ostensibly helps protect the health of the city’s youth.

The policy impacts both the education and the broader well-being of children around the city —much more so for children from poorer families like Gautam.

“I don’t like online classes,” she said, sitting on a bed her family share at night in their spartan one-room home in the city’s west. “I like going to school and playing outside, but my mother says there is too much pollution and I must stay inside.”

Gautam struggles to follow the day’s lesson, with the sound of her teacher’s voice periodically halting as the connection drops out on the cheap Android phone.

Her parents both earn paltry incomes — her polio-stricken father by working at a roadside food stall and her mother as a domestic worker.

Neither can afford to skip work and look after their only child, and they do not have the means to buy air purifiers or take other measures to shield themselves from the smog.

Gautam’s confinement at home is an additional financial burden for her parents, who normally rely on a free-meal programme at her government-run school to keep her fed for lunch.

“When they are at school I don’t have to worry about their studies or food.

At home, they are hardly able to pay any attention,” Gautam’s mother Maya Devi said.

“Why should our children suffer? They must find some solution.”

Delhi and the surrounding metropolitan area, home to more than 30 million people, consistently tops world rankings for air pollution.

The city is blanketed in acrid smog every winter, primarily blamed on agricultural burning by farmers to clear their fields for ploughing, as well as factories and traffic fumes.

Levels of PM2.5 — dangerous cancer-causing microparticles that enter the bloodstream through the lungs — surged 60 times past the World Health Organisation’s recommended daily maximum on Monday.

A study in the Lancet medical journal attributed 1.67 million premature deaths in India to air pollution in 2019.

Published in Dawn, November 23th, 2024