Mumbai Spends A Saturday Breathing What Delhi Usually Does
Smog settled over Bandra Kurla Complex on Saturday morning and the city’s municipal corporation spent the day setting out, at length, how much better Mumbai’s air has become
 |
| Image Source: @iam_Jinesh on X |
It listed the machinery behind this. Twenty-eight guidelines for construction sites and seventy-six ward squads to enforce them, each required to inspect two sites a day. Compulsory sensor monitors at building sites, 3,166 of them wired to a central dashboard. Twenty-nine road sweepers. Covered debris lorries with washed wheels, tracked through a dedicated system. Cleaner fuel at 384 of the city’s 593 bakeries, which it calculates produce 3.5 per cent of particulate emissions. Eighty-seven bakeries have not complied and eight have shut.
Are you kidding me? People on IG are getting hate just for calling out Mumbai’s pollution???
— Kritika Kabra (@Kritika_Kabra) October 24, 2026
Three days earlier, the Bombay High Court had taken a different view of the same machinery.
Hearing a case on festival pollution on 21 October, Justices Girish S Kulkarni and Neela Gokhale said rules and standard procedures appeared to exist “only on paper” and that the official apparatus was “extremely slow to act”. The judges asked for “an iota of compliance” — failing which, they said, the authorities should file an affidavit stating “we are helpless and not interested in maintaining or complying with the orders”.
Spirit of Mumbai ♥️ stepped out for 2 mins today and was surprised to see the reality.
— happy kid. (@artsysoull) October 24, 2026
The bench called it shocking that Mumbai’s pollution was surpassing Delhi’s in a city with sea breezes and open ground. It banned firecrackers outright on public streets and in silence zones near hospitals, courts and schools, after finding its earlier orders were being ignored. It gave the corporation and the state pollution board until Saturday to publish public notices it had ordered on 15 October and which had not appeared.
The municipal commissioner, the Mumbai police commissioner and the head of the pollution control board have been summoned to appear on Monday. The court has raised the prospect of contempt.
Residents, meanwhile, have their own evidence.
Mumbai Pollution: This is not a crisis. This is an emergency situation. In the garb of “infrastructure development” - we have let things go out of control. https://t.co/qQpSxEwJek
— Vishal Bhargava (@VishalBhargava5) October 24, 2026
“Step out for a bit in Mumbai and come back with bad headache, irritated throat and watery eyes,” one Sonal Bhutra posted on X. The former Rajya Sabha member Priyanka Chaturvedi noted that Delhi’s reading had come in below Mumbai’s: “Another reality I never thought I’d live to see in my lifetime.”