This assembly of charts and maps shows the material-semiotic categories through which "Delhi air pollution" can be visualised. Land-locked. Temperature inversion. Stubble burning. Dust. Thermal emissions. Vehicle exhaust. Hazardous. Delhi's air comes into existence in relation to mapping flows of wind, fire, dust, and rain.
Through visualization techniques that attempt to place Delhi's air, the question of scale in environmental governance is constantly brought up. Maps and charts display various scalar attachments to air. It is clear to everyone that state governments must collaborate. But how would such collaboration look like under current political regimes? What would it tell about federal relations within a postcolonial nation-state?Further, the scale at which air is monitored influences the type of pollution-health link being drawn.
Rather than traces, there is an abundance of toxicity. I could drown in the field of representation when I search for Delhi's air online. The problem for me is to find erasures of toxicity, both in terms of how unequal breathing exposures are represented scientifically and visually, and of how toxic histories of disposession are (not) grappled with in this field of representation.
It is undoutedly at Delhi's ever-shifting borders that concentrations of toxicity are imagined. Whether it is the burning of agricultural stubble in neighboring states of Punjab and Haryana, the thermal power plants and brick kilns that dot the peri-urban and rural regions around Delhi, the movement of dust from elsewhere, or the chemically hazardous factories and household industries in Delhi's industrial suburbs where people dissemble and recycle electrical components from everywhere in the world--the toxic air in Delhi is constructed through its marginal spaces.
In late 1990s and early 2000s, entities inside Delhi were imagined as polluting the city and they were shifted out through legal processes, creating precarious conditions for factory workers and public transport drivers.
The visualization supports the argument that pollution does, at least somewhat, stay inside particular (political) borders. The aim is to challenge a particular discourse of air-as-equalizer that stands in the way of a social justice approach to tackling air pollution by framing air as a human rights issue.
I would suggest to possibly include more detail on ethnographic details of life in Delhi - who are the people living in the particular hotspots and other zones that are mapped? What are their experiences of pollution? What are the different political groups living within the indicated borders?
The image was made by the author and is based on NGO-generated data of toxic hotspots in Delhi overlaid with data from a scientific paper, with added political borders. This composition draws attention to toxic clusters near these political borders, illustrating the point that pollution is a social justice issue. The origin of the banner on the left is unclear to me.
In the caption there is mention of political borders marked in red within the image, but I do not seem able to see this - only a purple makring of what I presume is the outline of Delhi. Are they the dark-grey rectangles? If so, maybe adjust either the image or the caption to avoid confusion.
This image speaks to the mutliple scales at which toxics operate when it comes to air pollution, and how they are entangled in political sruggles. It also speaks to how different types of data can be mobilised in the particular political framing of an issue as wither a question of social justice or individual rights.
