Death by breath: Delhi reels under smog attack again, still no combat strategy

We've been here before. Exactly this time last year, in fact. Not to mention every year for nigh on a decade, with any improvement in air quality brought about by a Supreme Court ordered move towards the use of Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) in public transport vehicles in 2001 wiped out just six years later. What we've seen instead is air so thick and noxious a cinereous haze through which barely anything can be seen that on November 7 the Indian Medical Association declared it a "public health emergency" and recommended that people submit themselves to a voluntary period of house arrest. "Welcome to the Apocalypse", as this reporter overheard one young mother say to another as they dropped their children off at school in central Delhi, air masks clamped firmly to everyone's faces. A day or so later, the schools were closed.

Still, casting about for some cheer, Anumita Roychowdhury, an executive director at the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) in Delhi, argues that this year is different, a watershed of sorts. "For the first time," she says, sitting at a small round table in a hall in the organisation's Lodhi Road office, "this region, this country actually,