The Making of Air Pollution: A Genealogy of Environmental Governance in Delhi

• In Event: Environmental Sociology Section Open Call Paper Session

Abstract

Between 2015 and 2019, PM2.5 pollution in Delhi caused an estimated 57,000 premature deaths. Yet the conditions under which this harm became visible as a public crisis, legible to the state, actionable in law, and speakable in public discourse, are themselves historically produced. This paper asks how air pollution in Delhi moved from an unmarked atmospheric condition to a contested object of governance, law, and media attention. Visibility, I argue, is not a natural outcome of worsening conditions. It is institutionally mediated, politically selective, and deeply shaped by the colonial inheritances of the postcolonial developmental state.
Drawing on Foucault's concept of governmentality (1991) and Max Liboiron's argument (2021) that pollution is a colonial relation, I analyze three bodies of archival material: Delhi's Master Development Plans from 1962 to the present, Supreme Court judgments centered on MC Mehta v. Union of India, and a Factiva corpus of over 75,000 news articles spanning the 1980s to 2025. I read for how air is categorized, what language surrounds it, whose bodies are centered in governance, and what remains absent.
Findings trace three distinct epistemic moments. In 1962, air appears in planning discourse as localized industrial nuisance, managed through spatial segregation. In the 1986 MC Mehta judgment, air enters the legal frame incidentally, with the infrastructure for atmospheric governance being constructed even as diffuse, citywide pollution remains judicially invisible. By 2014, following the WHO's ranking of Delhi as the world's most polluted capital, the media archive registers a qualitative shift: air pollution becomes hypervisible, grievable, and fully politicized. For environmental sociology, this approach offers a way to move upstream of the crisis, toward the institutional, legal, and epistemic conditions that determine which forms of harm become socially legible, and which do not.

Author

• Monika Pareek, Florida State University