Anders Antonsen, the Danish badminton player and world number four, was in New Delhi for the BWF World Championships, and made his position on returning in January clear. Antonsen told reporters that Delhi’s pollution is…

Anders Antonsen, the Danish badminton player and world number four, was in New Delhi for the BWF World Championships, and made his position on returning in January clear. Antonsen told reporters that Delhi’s pollution is “pretty insane” in January and February, when the India Open is usually held, and that he would rather pay another $5,000 fine than play then. He withdrew from this year’s India Open over air pollution, paying the fine for the third straight year, and has urged the BWF to shift it to August. “Imagine having your pulse high and trying to fight for air,” he said.The remark deserves better than a controversy about a pampered athlete and a demanding calendar. Buried inside a player’s decision to pay $5,000 to avoid Delhi is something the city’s residents have understood for two decades: air pollution here is a tax that only some can afford to pay their way out of.Delhi bans construction activities from December 10 to January 20 to curb air pollution$5,000, roughly Rs 4.2 lakh, would take an average Indian, earning the country’s per-capita GDP of about $2,700 a year, close to a year and a half to save. Antonsen absorbs it against tournament winnings and endorsements, then returns to cleaner air. His retreat costs money, not his lungs.Set that against Sunita Kumari, a construction labourer in Okhla, on a December morning when the AQI in her locality touched 600, a hundred points past what most monitoring scales are built to register. Kumari has no fine to pay and no flight to catch. Missing a day’s labour costs her the full wage, so she goes anyway, coughing through a lung condition she now treats as permanent. “Whatever damage will happen, we are well past that stage,” she said. The real comparison is not sport against city life, but the price of exit. For Antonsen, refusal is settled in dollars. For Kumari, and four in five Delhi workers in informal jobs, it is not on the menu.Delhi’s winter air does not discriminate on paper: meteorology does not check bank balances before trapping crop-residue smoke, vehicle exhaust and construction dust under a cold-weather inversion. But the city built around that air discriminates constantly. A 2024 Lancet Planetary Health study found Delhi lost the highest share of any Indian city to PM2.5 exposure, nearly 12,000 deaths a year; a companion national study put India’s toll at 1.5 million excess deaths annually above WHO limits. The Washington Post calculated that an average day of Delhi air delivers roughly nine cigarettes’ worth of smoke to every resident.Centre approves scheme to scrap old trucks and buses in Delhi-NCR to curb air pollutionThe exposure pathways behind those deaths separate sharply by income. A 2023 Chintan study found abnormal lung function in 86% of sanitation workers and 75 per cent of waste pickers surveyed. Most of the city’s urban poor walk to work with no windows to roll up, and inhale PM2.5 at nearly double the concentration car occupants do.For those with means, Delhi has quietly built a shadow infrastructure of avoidance. When AQI breaches 450, and GRAP escalates to Stage IV, offices send staff home and schools go online, measures presuming a home worth retreating to: reliable electricity to run a purifier, a parent free to supervise online school rather than earn a wage. A purifier adequate for the worst days costs Rs 18,000 to 28,000, several months’ income for a daily-wage household.Return to Antonsen’s $5,000. The BWF did not design that fine as commentary on inequality; it exists to punish athletes who skip mandatory tournaments. But being blunt and reason-agnostic, it puts a price on the right to refuse Delhi’s air, trivial for a world-class player, unreachable for almost everyone in the city he is declining to visit.Antonsen offers proof of a choice that already exists, quietly, for everyone breathing in Delhi: to leave, work indoors, buy filtration, avoid the street. His fine comes with a dollar figure and a press release. Kumari’s, paid in lung capacity and permanent damage, comes with neither.The policy question is what a Graded Response Action Plan is built to protect, and for whom. A genuine emergency response to thousands of annual deaths would not stop at online classes and purifiers priced beyond a labourer’s wage; it would target sources directly, crop-residue burning, unregulated construction dust, an ageing vehicle fleet, industrial emissions.Winter will come in a few months’ time, and North India will brace for smoggy, high-alert days, media headlines will scream about the AQI and publish listicles ranking Indian cities among the worst polluted in the world. If little changes this year too, Delhi will keep running two emergency plans every winter: one priced in dollars for those who can leave, one priced in years for those who cannot.Amit Kumar works in the corporate sector, and writes on politics and society.(Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author’s own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.)

Source: Deccan Herald