Children suffer as schools go online in polluted Delhi

NEW DELHI – Trapped in her family’s ramshackle shack due to the toxic smog choking India’s capital, Harshita Gautam struggled to listen to her teacher’s instructions on a cheap mobile phone borrowed from her mother.

The nine-year-old is among nearly two million students in and around New Delhi who have once again been ordered to stay at home. ordered schools to close due to worsening air pollution.

Now the tedious annual ritual of keeping children home and moving classes online for a few days during the peak of the winter smog crisis is supposedly helping to protect the health of the city’s youth.

These policies impact both the education and broader well-being of schoolchildren across the city – much more so for children from poorer families like Gautam.

“I don’t like online classes,” she told AFP, sitting on the bed her family shares at night in their spartan one-room home in the west of the city.

“I like going to school and playing outside, but my mom says there is too much pollution here and I need to stay home.”

Gautama struggles to follow the day’s lesson, but the sound of her teacher’s voice is intermittently interrupted when the connection on the cheap Android phone drops.

Both her parents earn meager incomes: her polio-stricken father works at a roadside food stall, and her mother works as a domestic worker.

Neither of them can afford to miss work to look after their only child, and they don’t have the funds to buy air purifiers or take other measures to protect themselves from the smog.

Gautama’s confinement at home places an additional financial burden on her parents, who typically rely on her public school’s free lunch program to feed her lunch.

“When they are at school, I don’t have to worry about their studies or food. At home, they are almost unable to pay attention,” Gautam’s mother Maya Devi told AFP.

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

Delhi and its surrounding metropolis, home to more than 30 million people, consistently top the world’s air pollution rankings.

Every winter, the city is blanketed in acrid smog, primarily caused by farmers setting fire to crops to clear their fields for plowing, as well as factories and vehicle exhaust fumes.

Levels of PM2.5 – dangerous carcinogenic microparticles that enter the bloodstream through the lungs – on November 18 exceeded the World Health Organization’s recommended daily maximum by 60 times.

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

Partial government initiatives include partial restrictions on fossil fuel-powered vehicles and water tankers that spray fog to clear particulate matter from the air.

But none have been able to make a significant impact on the worsening public health crisis.

“Lots of glitches”

Air pollution seriously affects children, with devastating effects on their health and development.

Scientific evidence shows that children who breathe polluted air are at higher risk of developing acute respiratory infections, the UN Children’s Agency said in a 2022 report.

A 2021 study published in the medical journal Lung India found that nearly one in three school-age children in the capital suffers from asthma and airway obstruction.

Swami Sivananda Memorial Institute school principal Sunita Bhasin told AFP that school closures due to pollution have been steadily increasing over the years.

“It’s easy for the government to announce school closures, but… abrupt closures cause a lot of disruption,” she said.

Ms. Bhasin said many Delhi children will continue to breathe the same toxic air anyway, be it at school or at home.

“There is no room for them in the houses, so they will go outside and play.” AFP