"It Enters My Throat and Lungs," Cigarette Seller Tells AFP From Loni

Kanwar Singh gets off his motorbike and starts brushing at his clothes. A fine layer of dust has settled on him during a short ride through the streets of Loni, on the outskirts of Delhi. ^[1]

"It enters my throat and lungs," the 55-year-old cigarette seller told AFP. ^[1]

In the evening he drinks hot water and gargles so he can breathe more easily. He says he has respiratory problems, wears a mask or a cloth over his face, and takes medicine. ^[1]

No diagnosis of his condition has been reported, and his account alone cannot say what caused his symptoms. What it does show is how a number on a chart arrives at one man's chest.

The number behind the dust

The number is this. IQAir's annual figures put Loni's average concentration of PM2.5 at 112.5 micrograms per cubic metre. ^[1] PM2.5 means particles smaller than 2.5 micrometres across, a fraction of the width of a human hair. The World Health Organization's annual guideline is five micrograms. Loni's average is more than 22 times that. ^[1]

The guideline is a health benchmark for years of breathing, not a verdict on one day or one ride. A trip of a few minutes is not what harms a body. The years are.

Loni was one of five areas in the Delhi metropolitan region, home to around 30 million people, that appeared among the world's 20 most polluted in IQAir's ranking. Four other Indian urban areas were on the list too. ^[1]

And the annual average hides the winter. Colder air traps pollutants close to the ground, and PM2.5 readings can exceed 800 micrograms per cubic metre, AFP reported. On Monday, amid Diwali fireworks, air in parts of New Delhi reached more than 58 times the WHO's daily guideline. ^[1] The Daily Inference reported on November 4 that readings in parts of the capital had passed 30 times the daily guideline, with vehicle restrictions, construction controls and work-from-home rules already in force.

This is the season in which Singh's dusty ride happens. It is worth keeping in mind what the dust on his shirt is and is not. Settled dust is coarse and visible. It is not a measure of PM2.5, which is too fine to see and which can travel deep into the lungs. According to AFP, some of it can enter the bloodstream. ^[1]

The dust on a sleeve is the part of the problem a man can brush away. The finer part goes in with every breath.

A town that makes things

Loni has more than 700,000 residents packed into a dense industrial area. Its factories process electronic waste, dye textiles, recycle plastic and work metal. ^[1]

The rules that should limit what comes out of their chimneys are not holding. Government air-quality officials who inspected Loni in August found widespread non-compliance with environmental rules, AFP reported, including factories running furnaces fuelled by wood and coal. ^[1] No penalties or corrections have been reported since.

Factories are only one source. AFP described traffic fumes, power station emissions and agricultural fires as contributors to the region's air, alongside poor roads, construction dust, vehicle exhaust and the burning of dirty fuels. ^[1]

Residents see the problem at ground level and say the official answer is thin. Water-sprinkler trucks pass along the roads and give only fleeting relief, they told AFP. ^[1] A spray can hold down coarse road dust for a while, but it does nothing about the finer particles from tailpipes and furnaces.

"Dust keeps coming," said shopkeeper Inamul Khan, who told AFP that residents have to wash their clothes and bedding two or three times to get them clean. ^[1]

The frustration is not new. CNN, reporting from Loni in April, also described the town's poor air and the gap between efforts to clean it and the pollution that continued. ^[4] Those who live here have heard the promises before.

What the body keeps

Savita Devi, a housewife, described the morning to AFP. Her eyes burn and her throat troubles her. People in the area fall sick often, she said. When the pollution hangs over the neighbourhood early in the day, it leaves her uneasy and unwilling to do anything. ^[1]

That last complaint is the hardest to put in a table, and perhaps the most honest. A town that breathes this air does not only have a health statistic. It has a slower, grayer way of living.

The statistics are there too, and they are large. The WHO calls fine particulate matter a proxy indicator for air pollution. In plain terms, polluted air is a mix of many substances that are hard to track one by one, so researchers measure the fine particles as a stand-in for the whole problem. The WHO says there is strong evidence of negative health impacts from exposure, and estimates that outdoor air pollution caused 4.2 million premature deaths worldwide in 2019. ^[2] Spread over the year, that is about 11,500 people every day.

The State of Global Air, a project that tracks pollution and health, lists what long-term PM2.5 exposure is linked to. The list includes ischemic heart disease, lung cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, lower-respiratory infections, stroke, type 2 diabetes and adverse birth outcomes. ^[3] Nothing on it is rare, and most of it is chronic. These are conditions that build over years in ordinary bodies, then arrive as a hospital bill or a funeral.

In Delhi the scale is visible. An analysis by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air estimated that air pollution was linked to 17,188 deaths in the city in 2023, nearly 15 percent of the total. AFP described it as Delhi's biggest individual risk factor. ^[1] That works out to about 47 deaths a day.

A doctor in Loni, quoted by CNN in April, said he had seen more patients with respiratory problems over the previous five years, including young children with early asthma symptoms. He called environmental exposure one prominent factor, not a proven cause in any individual case. ^[4] The distinction is the right one. Medicine can say what pollution does to a population far more firmly than it can say what it did to one child's lungs.

That is also why Singh's story is a window and not a case file. The studies describe what happens across millions of people breathing air like his. They cannot say what happened in his throat.

The price of leaving

Exposure is not equal. A man who sells cigarettes from the street and rides through the dust has no desk to retreat to, no sealed room with a filter, and no way to work from home when the readings climb.

Singh said he earns about $5 a day. ^[1] A mask or a cloth is within reach. Medicine is what he already pays for. Moving somewhere cleaner is not.

He has thought about it. He told AFP: "If we had money, we would have bought a flat elsewhere." ^[1]

The question for the winter ahead is whether enforcement will reach the furnaces, chimneys and construction sites that residents point to, or only the dust that settles on the road. For now Singh has his hot water, his gargling and his mask. And on the day AFP met him, after a short ride, he got off the bike and brushed the dust from his clothes.