At the HT Leadership Summit, NDTV’s Padmaja Joshi sat down with Delhi Chief Minister Rekha Gupta, and then spent the next several minutes watching Gupta bench-press the limits of logic. What followed was a live demonstration of how confidently stated nonsense can still aspire to be policy.

Take Gupta’s claim that AQI is basically “like a temperature” that you can measure “from any instrument, anywhere”. A charming thought, if air pollution worked like a school thermometer and not, say, a complex metric governed by parameters, protocols, and the pesky laws of physics. 

Joshi asked about allegations of water being sprayed on air monitors. Gupta said, “Tell me, what is a hotspot? A hotspot is where there’s the most pollution. Right? What’s the solution? You spray there, you water it. You work to improve the soil. So, you’ll spray only on the hotspot. Does using a monitor bring down the AQI? AQI is like a temperature which you can know from any instrument, so watering it is the only solution which we are also doing.”

Joshi did not probe this explanation for AQI measurement or the efficacy of water spraying in a city where road dust is just one component of the toxic mix.

“Meter pe hi toh nahin daal rahe aap paani (are you sprinkling water on air monitors)?” Joshi cross-questioned smilingly. Gupta laughed and said “they can say anything”.

Newslaundry had earlier reported how several of Delhi’s air quality monitoring stations were themselves in violation of basic norms, placed behind trees, beside walls, or hemmed in by buildings that obstruct airflow within the mandatory 20-metre radius. As the city’s air turned poisonous again this season, reports and on-ground findings suggested the government has gone a step further, not to fight pollution, but to massage the numbers that measure it.

A tough question Joshi had for Gupta was continued smog in Delhi under her government despite the reduction in stubble-burning in Punjab. To this came Gupta’s brag: that the government has “maintained” Delhi’s AQI “even after celebrating festivals”. A lovely claim, except for that small footnote known as missing AQI data, pointed out by several media reports. 

Joshi, tragically, did not ask how one maintains a metric that isn’t fully available.

There were several other highlights from Gupta’s parallel universe as the Delhi CM insisted there was no “magic wand” for Delhi’s “legacy problem”.

On the Yamuna river being toxic white days after the government claimed a clean-up, Gupta claimed the previous government had neither set up a process nor taken any step to check unfiltered waste in the Yamuna. She said her government was working on these issues but it can’t be resolved in a day.

Notably, the NGT had directed to form a high-level panel to look into these issues in January 2023 and this was chaired by the Lieutenant Governor and included Delhi government departments. 

When Joshi asked about the viral image showing a “pond” next to the Yamuna ahead of Chhath festivities, Gupta offered an origin story involving steep ghats, mud, floods, barricades, and a pool that was apparently both natural and not natural depending on the sentence. 

“We made cosmetic ghats, pools, and used different ways to prepare Chhath ghats keeping people’s faith in mind,” Gupta said.

“Since the river is steep and so that no one slips and falls, barricades were put up everywhere…In some places, it was made of wood, in others, cement blocks…there was a similar barricade at Vasudev Ghat because there was a flood before that. You would have noticed that the water at Vasudev Ghat flowed to the cremation ground. Kai truck mitti humne wahaan se hata ke us poore ghat ko saaf kiya aur wahaan se jab pool bana toh woh mitti saamne thi. Woh pehle bhi uska natural space tha (we removed several truckloads of mud from there and cleaned the entire ghat, and when we built the pool there, that mud was there. That was its natural space even before.”

“They said a pool has been made. That way, there were many such pools,” she said.

Newslaundry had reported how the water in the enclosure was at a level lower than the river around it. When Joshi asked if it was the Yamuna’s water in the enclosure, Gupta said, “The water that sifted through the soil; you can call it Bisleri, or Ganga ji, but my Poorvanchali brothers in Delhi were happy. I don’t care if the opposition has a stomach ache from this.”

The proof of the government’s effort, Gupta insisted, was the “sparkle in everyone’s eyes” captured by “channels”. Read all about the Yamuna PR wash here.

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