An open blanket as a roof and a low-end telephone as her only link with her teacher... Since the closure of her school in New Delhi due to serious air pollution, Harshita has not been celebrating.
“I don’t like online class,” the 9-year-old complains, staring at the tiny laptop screen. “I like going to school and playing outside. But my mother told me there was too much pollution and I should stay home.”
The emergency plan established by the municipality provides for online courses instead.
But, due to lack of resources, education is, along with health, the main victim of the pollution season that hits Delhi every winter. Especially that provided to the most deprived students.
For Harshita, today's lesson has taken on the appearance of an ordeal. On the folding bed that serves as her chair, she strains her ears to catch the snatches of instructions from her teacher that reach her through the variations of the network.
Her parents support their only daughter on a meager income. He sells food on the street, she is a cleaner.
No one can afford to stay home to teach her, much less buy an air purifier to protect her from the polluted air when she is not in class.
And if that weren't enough, she also has to eat lunch. Her public school offers her a free lunch every day.
“When she is at school, I don’t have to worry about her studies or her diet,” says her mother, Maya Devi. “At home, she has trouble concentrating,” she adds. “Why should our children suffer? There are solutions, right?”
– “Playing in the street” –
New Delhi regularly tops the ranking of the most polluted cities on the planet.
To the toxic fumes from industries and vehicles in which the megacity is bathed all year round, there is added, from the beginning of winter, that of agricultural burning carried out in neighbouring regions.
Colder temperatures and weaker winds are shrouding the city in a fog where the concentration of harmful microparticles exceeds – up to 60 times this year – the thresholds tolerated by the World Health Organization (WHO).
Pollution is responsible for thousands of premature deaths every year in Delhi from heart disease, respiratory illness and cancer.
A study published in the medical journal The Lancet attributed the deaths of 1.67 million Indians in 2019 to poor air quality.
Modest and haphazard, the measures adopted so far by the municipality to protect the health of its residents have had little effect, particularly on the youngest among them.
Nearly a third of school-age children in the Indian capital suffered from asthma or breathing difficulties, according to a 2021 study published by the medical journal Lung India.
Sunita Bhasin, principal of Swami Sivananda Memorial School, an NGO specialising in the education of poor children, notes that the number of days schools in the capital are closed due to pollution is increasing every year.
"It is easy for the government to issue a general directive to close schools, but the abrupt suspension of classes causes a lot of disruption," she notes.
And Ms Bhasin adds that, in any case, many children in Delhi breathe the same poisonous air at home as they do at school. "They have no place at home, so they go out to play in the street..."
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