Delhi is not breathing. It is surviving – minute by minute, gasp by gasp – under an Air Quality Index that has crossed the obscene threshold of 900 and nudged 1000, a number so catastrophic that it ceases to be data and becomes a medical emergency. Schools shut, flights diverted, lungs inflamed, eyes burning. And yet, in the midst of this slow-motion public health disaster, our governments behave not like custodians of life, but like spectators at a predictable annual tragedy.The official responses have become a parody repeated every winter. “This is a temporary phenomenon,” one minister assures us, as if toxic air obeys election calendars. Another blames “wind direction” with the earnestness of a weather vane. A third points fingers at neighbouring states, while a fourth announces odd-even restrictions with ceremonial seriousness – Delhi’s version of lighting a candle during an inferno. At nearly 1000 AQI, when the air itself turns hostile, these statements do not reassure; they ridicule the intelligence of the citizens forced to inhale this governance failure.Outside gated homes and sealed offices, delivery workers cycle through poison, children walk to schools clutching inhalers, and elderly residents are advised – by doctors, not governments – to leave the city if they wish to live. Pulmonologists now sound less like healthcare professionals and more like emergency evacuation planners. This is not governance. This is abdication.During the colonial era, the British shifted the capital to Shimla every summer to escape the heat. In independent India, perhaps the ruling political coterie should migrate every winter – until breathing becomes their problem too. That such a thought even sounds reasonable tells us how far we have fallen.But Delhi’s air crisis is not an isolated failure. It is part of a larger civilisational collapse, one where the state has quietly surrendered its most fundamental duty: safeguarding the commons. As the British scholar Ursula Huws warned decades ago, modern capitalism relentlessly converts use value into exchange value – turning what is essential for life into something to be sold. In India’s cities today, water has already been commodified. Air is next.Also read: ‘Digital Cities’ Built on Empty PromisesWater was the first casualtyOnce upon a time, supplying clean water was the moral and functional foundation of municipal governance. Cities existed to ensure that no resident had to purchase survival itself. That contract has been systematically broken.Indian cities no longer protect their lakes, recharge their aquifers, or harvest rain where it falls. Instead, they engage in ecological absurdities – dragging water across hundreds of kilometres, across districts and states, bleeding rivers dry in the process. Delhi’s water travels farther than its political accountability. Bengaluru drains neighbouring regions. Chennai once hauled water by train, as if governance were a logistics problem rather than a planning failure.Within cities, rivers have become open sewers, lakes real-estate opportunities, and groundwater a private quarry. Into this vacuum step two thriving markets: private water tankers and bottled water corporations. A basic human right is now wrapped in plastic and sold back to citizens at a premium. The tragedy is complete when households accept this as normal – when buying drinking water becomes as routine as buying milk.Water’s journey from right to commodity is done.Air follows the same pathThe rise of the air purifier marks a dark milestone in urban history. No civilisation before ours had to mechanically clean the air inside its homes to survive. This is not technological progress; it is systemic collapse disguised as consumer choice.The quiet hum of an air purifier is the sound of state failure. It cleans a few square feet while the city outside rots. It allows policymakers to pretend that pollution can be “managed” rather than eliminated. The logic is brutally simple: allow unrestricted pollution, weaken regulation, and then sell survival devices to those who can afford them.Air – once the ultimate commons – is now a market category.Pollution as a business modelDelhi did not arrive at 1000 AQI by mistake. This is the inevitable outcome of a development model addicted to fossil fuels, private vehicles, unregulated construction, and enforcement-free industrialisation. Construction dust, diesel freight corridors, coal-based power, and toxic industrial clusters are not anomalies – they are embedded features of our economic choices.Every winter, governments pretend surprise. Every winter, they announce emergency measures that are neither emergency nor measures. The truth is uncomfortable: pollution is profitable, and confronting it requires political courage that disrupts entrenched interests.Why real solutions are avoidedNeither air nor water crises are technological puzzles waiting for innovation. They are governance failures waiting for honesty.For water, the path is obvious: Capture rain where it falls; Restore lakes, wetlands, and floodplains as inviolable public assets; Rebuild municipal capacity instead of outsourcing responsibility; Treat and reuse wastewater locally.For air: Redesign urban mobility around public transport, not private cars; Penalise congestion and fossil-heavy transport instead of subsidising it; Enforce emission norms without political exemptions; Reclaim green belts, forests, and commons – the real lungs of cities.This is not anti-development. This is survival planning.A city reducedWhen citizens protest for breathable air and drinkable water, democracy itself is in distress. The young people at India Gate holding placards that read “Let us breathe” are not radicals; they are witnesses to a state that has forgotten its purpose.Ursula Huws warned that once capitalism begins commodifying life-sustaining systems, it does not stop. It moves from labour to services, from services to social life, and finally into ecology itself.Water has already been privatised.Air is being monetised.The question now is stark and unavoidable: Will life itself become a luxury item in India’s cities? Or will we reclaim the commons before another winter turns governance into a crime scene?Delhi cannot afford another season of lies. Our lungs, our rivers, and our dignity demand better – now.Tikender Singh Panwar was once directly elected deputy mayor of Shimla. He was linked with the Leh Vision document and has written vision documents for a dozen cities. Author of three books, he is an urban specialist working in the design of inclusive cities and also a member of the Kerala Urban Commission.