Beyond the great smog: A year-round silt crisis choking urban India

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Gurugram: Every morning, Sumit Tayal, 38, a resident of Ballabgarh in Haryana, takes a state roadways bus to reach Sadar Bazar, the old shopping district in Gurugram. Tayal has been working at a garment store in the market for more than a decade. Over the years, as traffic on the roads multiplied, it took Tayal more and more time to cover the 45-km distance between Ballabgarh and Gurugram. These days, it takes him about two and a half hours each way, or five hours of commute—daily.

Tayal makes this journey every day of the week, including on weekends. But the most distressing part of the ride is the air he is forced to breathe and the unmeasured quantities of dust he inhales.

“The roads are very dusty and trucks carrying construction material and debris without a cover add to the problem,” Tayal said.

As a consequence, he often suffers from coughing bouts and respiratory tract infections, which intensify during the winter months when air pollution levels spike.

Tayal is a fervent advocate of public transport and joined Clean Air Bharat, a citizen activist group with chapters in multiple cities. “Because I post on (civic) issues like illegal waste burning and unpaved or dug up roads, my social media account is blocked repeatedly,” Tayal said.

Nirvana Country, in another part of Gurugram in Sector 50, is a world away from the chaos of Sadar Bazar. It is a gated residential society comprising independent houses, with a planned layout and lush greenery. It appears to be an ocean of calm compared to the din and dust that engulfs it—a debris hill on the edge and roads laden with dust. A conversation with a resident here bridges the miles separating Nirvana from Sadar Bazar.

Anup Sood, who moved into Nirvana in 2007, says it’s been a downhill journey when it comes to quality of life. Sood’s son was born in 2010 and the child was diagnosed with allergic rhinitis (inflammation of nasal passages as a reaction to airborne allergens) when he was just five, following exposure to dust and dirty air. His son, now 16, is unable to take part in physically demanding sports like football. The winters are a tough time for the family as the kid often suffers from wheezing and needs frequent nebulization.

“We are seriously contemplating moving out of Gurugram to a place where the air is breathable,” Sood said.

Ruchika Sethi, who founded Clean Air Bharat in 2016, also a resident of Nirvana, minces no words while describing the situation in the city: “Living here reminds me of the iconic (1979) film Kala Patthar and the mine workers covered in soot. In the Gurugram of 2026, the black soot is replaced by a grey-white film of dust.”

The sources of dust, Sethi says, are local and very controllable. Most of it comes from dumping of construction and demolition waste in open areas, following little or no dust management protocols during construction, and unpaved and dug up roads.

“In Mumbai, they have the Malabar Hills (an upscale residential area) but what we have here are ‘malwa’ hills,” she said.

Malwa is Hindi for construction debris. Sethi has seen countless such hills gain height over the years, including one which abuts her home in Nirvana Country.

Gurugram’s rapid transformation from a quiet backcountry to a rapidly urbanizing corporate hub at the turn of the century earned it the moniker ‘millennium city’. In reality, it scorches in summer, floods during monsoon, and turns into a gas chamber during winter. The dust, however, is always around, like a shroud hanging over the metropolis.

Air pollution in the Delhi-National Capital Region is no longer a problem limited to winter months, said Arunesh Kumar, a pulmonologist. “Prolonged exposure is leading to COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) and asthma. We are increasingly seeing such cases among non-smokers. Similarly, I am seeing cases of lung cancer among young patients who are non-smokers and have no family history of cancer,” he said.

Yet, Gurugram is not an exception. Many Indian cities have literally turned into dustbowls. Silt loads on Indian roads are 25-30 times more than in developed countries, found a 2024 paper by researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi and Kanpur (published in the journal Science of the Total Environment).

The researchers, who collected data from 259 locations in 32 cities across India, found that road dust levels exceeded World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines in 55% of cases. They estimated that about 10,000 lives are lost annually due to PM2.5 pollution attributable to road dust.

The State of the Global Air Report 2025, put together by the Boston-based Health Effects Institute and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, located at the University of Washington School of Medicine, attributes more than two million deaths in India to air pollution.

PM2.5 refers to particulate matter less than 2.5 microns in size while PM10 are larger particles with a diameter of less than 10 microns; both are harmful pollutants that are easily inhalable due to their tiny size. The IIT study also noted that road dust emissions contribute 30-60% of PM2.5 and PM10 levels in metropolitan regions in India.

A 2026 working paper by WRI India, an environment think tank, found that silt load values in three cities—Mumbai, Ahmedabad and Indore—varied between one and 20 gram/square meter (a measure of the weight of dust over a specific area). The highest silt load values seen on certain stretches of these cities were 6.8 gram/square meter in Mumbai, 4.9 gram/square meter in Indore and 19.7 gram/square meter in Ahmedabad, based on actual dust that was collected from the road tops (and not from the edges) and measured.

Secondary data cited in the report show that in a city like Milan in Italy the dust levels ranged between 0.006-0.066 gram/square meter. The globally accepted standard is less than 1-2 gram per square…