Why is no one talking about Kolkata’s air pollution?

There was a time when December in Kolkata meant poetry in the air. The mist hung low over the Maidan, trams looked like moving silhouettes, and the city carried a cinematic calm. But the city’s beloved “fog” is no longer a seasonal mood. It is, increasingly, particulate pollution wearing a poetic mask. And the city’s romance with its own haze has become self-destructive. Drive over the Maa Flyover on a winter morning — from Park Circus to the EM Bypass — you’ll see it, or rather, not see it. The once-distinct skyline, the eastern high-rises, dissolve into a blur. Visibility collapses, and yet traffic rolls on, horns blaring through the grey. It’s an invisible crisis, one we have decided not to talk about.

The machines are less forgiving. Real-time data from Kolkata’s air-quality stations show the Victoria Memorial belt repeatedly slipping into the “very poor” bracket, peaking at an AQI of 366 on December 12. The drivers are unglamorous: Dust resuspended by footfall and roadwork, dry soil that lifts easily, and winter inversion trapping pollution close to breathing height. The city’s postcard lungs have now turned into a smog chamber. And yet, political energies are spent elsewhere. West Bengal is headed into the Assembly election, and the campaign season has its own climate. Parties fill the air with identity quarrels, religious insinuations, and arguments over the Centre-state relations. The latest front is the Election Commission’s SIR. Citizens, meanwhile, talk about jobs, prices, safety, waterlogging, and hospitals. Not air. Smog has no single “moment”; it is a slow emergency, and that makes it easy to ignore. IQAir’s global report puts Kolkata’s 2024 annual average PM 2.5 concentration at 45.6 micrograms per cubic metre, almost nine times the World Health Organisation’s recommended limit. In any functioning democracy, that statistic alone would trigger legislative debate. In Kolkata, it barely trends. According to Down To Earth’s reports, Kolkata’s air “toxicity” spikes sharply once PM 2.5 crosses roughly 70 µg/m³, and that threshold was breached on nearly three-fourths of winter days in the study period.

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Politics offers performance, with sprinklers on trucks, anti-smog guns, sweeping drives before VIP visits. In this, dust becomes the scapegoat because it is visible and politically safe. A WBPCB (West Bengal Pollution Control Board)-commissioned CSIR-NEERI source-apportionment study (2019) points elsewhere. In winter, secondary aerosols contribute 32 per cent of Kolkata’s fine-particulate load, vehicles 25 per cent, wood burning 15 per cent, and coal 9 per cent. Secondary aerosols, formed when precursor gases such as ammonia and nitrogen oxides react in the air, cannot be swept away. They demand regulation across fuels, vehicles and waste burning, seemingly costly “politics” in an election year. Denial, in India, is an administrative art. The Centre puts the responsibility for controlling air pollution on the states. The state points to transboundary inflow. The municipal corporation pleads jurisdiction. Everyone is partially right, and therefore fully unaccountable. Even money does not guarantee seriousness. The World Bank has repeatedly warned that without regionwide coordination, city-level tinkering will hit a wall. Every credible study repeats the same prescriptions: Phase down dirty vehicles, control open burning, monitor construction, treat Kolkata and Howrah as one airshed, and publish real-time enforcement data. But policies demand pressure. And pressure demands politics.

Imagine if each PM 2.5 spike demanded a ministerial statement the way a central-state fund release does. That would be politics worthy of India’s second-most-polluted metro (2024). Until air quality becomes a campaign question, Kolkata’s December sky will stay the same dull grey: Part dust, part smoke, part denial. The fog we once loved has turned against us. What remains is not ignorance; it is consent.

The writer is a German Chancellor Fellow (2024–25) with the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation