New Delhi Is Already Back to Its Bad Old Ways

When Covid-19’s delta wave subsided and the sirens stopped wailing, when the hundreds of thousands of funeral pyres burned out and the bodies stopped washing up on the banks of the Ganges, when the desperate pleas for oxygen and hospital beds no longer dominated social media, New Delhi simply hit “erase” on its collective memory and walked away.

It would be inaccurate to say nothing has changed in this mega-city of 33 million people[1] since the pandemic struck. But the big things — the environmental, unemployment and health-care problems that dominate India’s capital — are as present today as they ever were.

Last summer’s heat wave broke records. New Delhi hit a maximum temperature of 42C (107F) and above on at least 26 days, reaching 49C in some areas. That season’s wheat crop was scorched by the heat. It was so hot the rubber seals on the glass jars in my kitchen melted into the lids. Untold numbers of people died, and we all wondered how quickly the city would become unlivable, when the limits of survivability would be reached. India is already forecasting fresh heat waves across the northwest in the next three months, after the hottest February since 1901.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi warned of the dangers of heat waves and the fires that flare as a result — the enormous Bhalswa landfill site on the outskirts of the city had spontaneously combusted and burned for days in 2022, releasing toxic fumes that forced schools to close and caused serious health problems for nearby residents. But there was little concrete action from the government.

India has not yet signed the Global Methane Pledge — a pact that emerged from the United Nations COP26 climate change conference in 2021 to collectively cut global methane emissions by at least 30% from 2020 levels by 2030. That’s despite Modi’s ambitions for India to reach its net-zero target by 2070 and the government’s plans for a green energy transition.

Then winter came and the deadly pall of air pollution settled over the city — the fog mixed with smog so thick it reduced visibility on the roads to just meters. Construction across the city continued, dangerous and unregulated, contributing to the morass. In 2019, air pollution led to 1.6 million premature deaths in India, according to the Lancet. The skies were mercifully clear during the extended Covid lockdowns, but as soon as industry started up again and traffic returned to normal levels, the air quality noticeably worsened.

When combined with the smoke from crop stubble burning in neighboring states and a winter weather pattern that traps the air over Delhi, it becomes a toxic haze you can taste and smell.

For a region that routinely rates as one of the world’s most polluted, it should come as no surprise that Delhi’s (which contains New Delhi) average annual small-particulate matter (PM2.5) levels exceed 107 µg/m3, more than 21 times the World Health Organization guidelines for safe maximum levels, according to data from the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago. With a highly infectious respiratory infection bringing the global economy to its knees, you’d think national and state governments would invest in enforcing the mitigation measures already in place. Yet we heard little more than health warnings and school closures. The arrival of increasingly poisonous air is now as regular as any other season.

This is costing the economy around $95 billion each year, or around 3% of India’s total GDP. The pollution affects everything from absenteeism and recruitment (why work in Delhi when you could work in another mega-city with cleaner air, like Tokyo?) to general business operations and consumer spending (people aren’t out shopping when pollution spikes).

At the same time, politics in the capital has turned uglier than ever. For the last two years, nonprofit group Freedom House has rated India as only “partly free,” while it has been moved to an electoral autocracy from an electoral democracy by the V-Dem Institute, based at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party have driven the autocratization of India, with their lack of commitment to the democratic process, disrespect for minority rights, demonization of opponents and an acceptance of political violence, according to V-Dem. Each of these reports has provoked a furious response from the government.

Adding to those simmering tensions in Delhi, and across India more broadly, are soaring youth unemployment rates, scandalously low workforce participation rates for women and a crisis in education.

Delhi’s unemployment rate has mostly tracked above the national average and continues to do so post-pandemic. India’s jobless figure was 7.45% in February, compared with the national capital territory’s 8.6%, according to figures from the think tank Center For Monitoring Indian Economy. Last year, 200 young Indians marched 1,000 kilometers (621 miles) to the capital to demand access to jobs, after passing the highly competitive civil service exam and not being appointed to a position. Their frustration is a small representation of the devastating impact of Modi’s failure to create jobs for the nation’s vast reservoir of young workers, many of whom flock to the city from their villages seeking employment.

In the city itself, data from August indicates the average daily footfall at major metro stations had yet to return to pre-Covid levels, while overall vacancy levels have decreased to 21.9% in 2022 from 23.0% in 2021.

By 2036, India’s demographic dividend — the period of accelerated economic growth that can result from a decline in a country’s birth and death rates and the change in the age structure of the population — will have disappeared. Another missed opportunity for a nation brimming with so much talent.

The government talks a good game in attempting to lure companies to invest in India, offering incentives and improvements to the nation’s notoriously creaky infrastructure. Yet net foreign direct investment decreased to $6.4 billion in 2022 from $8.7 billion a year prior, the central bank reported in December.

It will be difficult to convince multinationals who watched New Delhi’s health system collapse during the delta wave that the capacity of the city’s hospitals has significantly improved. Health spending as a percentage of gross domestic product puts it near the bottom of the list by global standards. And there’s been little post-crisis reform.

Instead of allowing health-care services to be largely dominated by the private sector, which was unable to manage Covid, the government needs to properly fund a federal health system that can quickly scale up when required. That includes the urgent development of a nationwide, real-time infectious-diseases surveillance system — a tool that was glaringly absent during the pandemic.

Unless India improves its response to these challenges facing New Delhi, it risks squandering its growing influence on the global stage. Covid should have been a rebirth. Instead it’s just history repeating.