Over the decades, India has perfected a way of surviving catastrophe: the rich simply opt out. When healthcare fails, the rich build their own hospitals. When the water turns brown, we install filters at home and lay private pipelines. With every blistering summer, Delhi rebuilds itself as an archipelago of air-conditioned fortresses, each a small insurance policy against the failure of the collective. Health is purchased, education is corporatised, water comes in bottles, safety comes with private guards. The capital rebuilds itself as a mosaic of escapes — malls humming above drains of stagnant filth, gated colonies with apartheid-era segregated elevators glittering beside the slums that service them. https://thewire.in/rights/delhi-air-pollution-dissent-accountability
We live by subtraction — each family, each fortune, carving out a liveable island from a collapsing sea. A logic of separation, of purity and pollution that descends from the oldest grammar of the subcontinent, where the old taboo of caste eternally finds new technology.
To hold the government to account for our city, we must first have a conception of the city as ours — all of ours. That idea has been quietly dismantled, sold off square foot by square foot, as a depoliticised middle class and a repressed working class together produce what Delhi looks like today: a city choking in silence.
by Varsha Gandikota-Nellutla
10/11/2025