Each winter, the truth of Delhi is very simple: survival is a policy option

Every winter, Delhi buzzes with a packed social calendar full of cultural festivals, concerts, open-air food fairs, theatre, art exhibitions, literary events, and high-profile sports events which attract massive attendance across the city. Nevertheless, as these happenings inundate the parks, stadiums, and open grounds, Delhi wakes each dawn to a far grimmer scoreboard - the air pollution charts. Throughout the winter, the Commission for Air Quality Management (CAQM) has ranked Delhi and several National Capital Region (NCR) towns squarely in the “Very Poor” category with the Air Quality Index range of 301-400. Such a range is considered harmful even for healthy individuals and capable of triggering respiratory illness, eye irritation, and long-term health risks. Yet this serious reality is often reduced to mere images, appearing in newspapers year after year as festive crowds share space with masked commuters and smog-shrouded monuments. What rarely appears, however, are the poor who sell those very papers at traffic lights or use yesterday’s headlines to wrap flowers and the small goods that keep them going each day. The homeless which are defined by the Census of India as, individuals or families who do not live in census houses, but rather stay on pavements, roadsides, railway platforms, staircases, temples, streets, in pipes or other open spaces. These are the people that breathe the worst of the air and remain largely invisible, despite being the closest to the crisis. This invisibility masks a lethal ‘poverty loop’, a vicious cycle where the city’s marginalised and homeless are not only the primary victims of toxic air but out of a desperate need for warmth from the cold winter nights of Delhi, often become the involuntary contributors to it.

A vicious cycle

The poor population of Delhi, especially the homeless poor, are compelled to breathe in the most poisonous air of the city making pollution an aspect that is felt in a deadlier way by the poor. In India, it is dramatic: the State of Global Air 2025 reports that in 2023 more than 2 million deaths could be linked to air pollution: a figure that continues to rise year after year. Delhi sits at the epicentre of this emergency, as indicated in the Delhi Statistical Handbook, that the respiratory deaths have increased to 9,211 in 2024 from 8,801 in 2023. The gravity of the crisis is supported by the fact that the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air has noted Delhi to be the most polluted city in India during winter 2024-25, with an average PM 2.5 concentration of 159 µg/m³ (microgram per cubic metre) throughout the season which is more than 10 times the World Health Organization’s 24-hour safe limit of 15 µg/m³. The crisis deepened in November 2024 when the average surged to 249 µg/m³, the worst in eight years.

While polluted air affects all residents, it is the homeless who face its harshest effects. The NCR, home to nearly 58 million people, includes a large population with no physical protection from toxic smog, rising winter temperatures, cold winds, and other seasonal weather extremes. Although the 2011 Census indicated that there are merely 46,724 individuals living in the streets, recently, independent  civil society counts have shown a far worse picture of over 3,00,000 people on the streets. These are the city’s homeless workers, construction labourers, waste pickers, street vendors whose livelihoods keep the city functioning, even as the city fails to protect them. The panic-stricken searching for warmth is the best way to describe the desperation of these winter nights. According to the field reports conducted by India Development Review (IDR), chronic shortage of blankets and heating facilities in shelters make the homeless have no choice. With an obligation of sustaining themselves by their own efforts, a lot of them light so-called comfort fires on the asphalt made of wood scraps, cardboard, rags and mixed trash. In October and November 2022, the Delhi Pollution Control Committee listed 824 open-burning incidents in itself, which serves as a grim reminder of the hundreds of survival fires which the homeless also involuntarily add to. Due to the inability to offer basic shelter, coupled with inaccurate government data, Delhi faces a humanitarian crisis as homelessness surges. The loss of 474 lives of homeless people because of the exposure to freezing winter nights between November 15, 2024, and January 10, 2025, is a tragedy that made the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) suo motu cognize the absence of the required protective measures.

And in this vicious cycle, when you have neither room nor heater nor money to buy fuel, you burn whatever you can get. In Delhi, rags, cardboard, scrap of wood and mixed garbage are typically used as fuel in such fires. Such mini fires which most people employ yearly do not just provide a little warmth. They also litter the night air with smokes whereby the burners expose the surrounding smokes with toxic fumes. The science is on its side: the ARAI-TERI source-apportionment study of Delhi-NCR allocates approximately 3 per cent of the annual PM 2.5 to refuse burning and landfill fires - an insignificant portion of the mass of city in general, but a chemically concentrated footprint of dioxins and metals in which the residents of the nearby area inhale overwhelmingly. The loop is finished by fuel poverty. Research-led national modelling and policy syntheses by the Clean Air Collective have converged on a sobering fact, namely that residential solid fuels are the largest source of population weighted ambient PM 2.5 in India - typically, about a third, but higher in isolated locations. The point is, the poorest not only breathe, but contribute a significant share of the smog load in the city - not by choice, but by default, having no other clean and affordable options.  

A policy failure, not just a weather event

Each winter, the truth of Delhi is very simple: survival is a policy option - of the fact that cold is merely what kills when systems that should have kept people warm turn weak, discriminatory, and non-beneficial to the poor and those in multidimensional poverty of the homeless. They are left wholly at the mercy of the government for safe and efficient shelters to keep them warm. Shelters save lives only when people have an opportunity to enter the shelter. But thousands are pushed out with the requests of identity cards and telephone numbers that the majority of the homeless do not have. As Article‑14 has reported, officials have routinely used these ID demands to keep the most vulnerable out of shelters, despite legal obligations to take them in. This violates their fundamental right to shelter under Article 21 of the Constitution, as affirmed by the Supreme Court in landmark cases like Chameli Singh v. State of U.P. (1996) where shelter was deemed essential for dignified life and Shantistar Builders v. Narayan Khimalal Totame (1990), recognising it as part of the right to reasonable accommodation. Despite these progressive judgments strengthening fundamental rights, implementation lags even in the capital, where homeless suffer during extreme weather and their search for survival pushes them back into the poverty-pollution cycle.

India has a place to shelter only a limited number of the homeless, and in Delhi alone, a vaguely low number of homeless actually receive the benefit of a shelter. This is not infrastructure failure in itself; it is structural design failure. The individual who has not got an Aadhaar, papers or even a functioning phone cannot be just left out to freeze just because bureaucracy wants to see the evidence. Delhi requires instant, nanotechnical identification - temporary IDs on-the-spot, community check, biometric allowances, thus everybody is not asked to leave the gate.

Meanwhile, the shelters should be used not just as one-night resorts. They need to transit into the modes of stabilisation by the available programs: Deendayal Antyodaya Yojana-National Urban Livelihoods Mission (DAY-NULM) shelters with social workers, Jan Dhan accounts, Ayushman Bharat enrolment, ration portability, loans to street-vendors, and skills programmes. The road out of homelessness is long, but even the fundamentals count: shelters that stay open 24/7, outreach workers who reach the homeless before hypothermia strikes, and kitchens treated as necessities, which reflects in the decision making and not only as an act of charity and glory.

To the people on the streets, clean fuel is not an LPG cylinder that they are unable to keep and use or cannot afford but rather the assurance of a hot meal that will make them warm up without having to burn trash. The plastic or rag or cardboard used in these so-called survival fires, suffocate air that is already the most difficult to breathe in and confine the homeless into a poverty trap. Cities also need to eliminate the fuel to such fires by making sure that the waste is off before going to bed. The example of Kerala demonstrates the potential: 95 per cent door-to-door waste collection, neighbourhood composting and biogas projects, and Haritha Karma Sena units led by women that keeps the streets clear and flammable waste not on the ground. This model of decentralised waste recovery is already promoted by national policy and waste recovery based on biogas and EPR can easily fund winter shelters, community kitchens, and rescue operations. The more the waste goes through the city, the more they make, the less they burn and they can breathe better. And when shelters open their doors and do not use IDs as gatekeeping weapons people are not moving towards slow and steady recovery with dignity but to emergency survival. That is how Delhi will be a winter‑ready city or should aspire to be.

Delhi is aware of how to welcome the world. The issue is whether it is able to self-care. Being an events city and humane city is not technically an issue; it is an ethical decision that should be made prior to the next cold front.

Gojesh Konsam, Aditi Agrawal and Jui Gusani are students of the Indian Institute of Forest Management (IIFM)

Views expressed are the authors’ own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth