Amit Kapoor and Meenakshi Ajith
For those of us who live in Delhi-NCR, every winter is now a déjà vu wrapped in smog; except it isn’t’ imagined but real. The script is also too familiar and almost normalised by now; AQI indices spike, schools close, flights circle, and the usual cast of villains takes the stage: stubble burning, diesel trucks, firecrackers and unhelpful winds. By February, the haze lifts just enough for everyone to move on with their lives. The real affliction in Indian cities and especially Delhi runs much deeper. The city is not just polluted but it is simply wasteful. Indian cities are designed to discard value as fast as it creates it.
India’s urbanisation is still built and continues to be built on a linear idea of growth: extract, produce, consume, throw away. This logic perhaps made sense in the early decades of industrialisation when raw materials were cheap and land was abundant. However, as we see now, this linear growth becomes brittle as it matures. Each tonne of waste, each plume of smoke, each overflowing drain marks not expansion but inefficiency. A waste of resources burned, nutrients dumped, energy lost. Delhi’s smog is the visible form of an economic design flaw.
Modern economies thrive when they learn to reuse their own leftovers. When the waste of one process becomes the input of another, output grows without new extraction. Each loop raises productivity a little; together they create a new source of growth. The cities that master this circulation as we see in Copenhagen with its district heating, Amsterdam with circular construction, Seoul with waste-energy grids, can gain efficiency as their next comparative advantage. India’s cities, by contrast, still chase scale rather than symmetry.
Delhi offers a brutal mirror to that end. Its three landfill mountains at Ghazipur, Bhalswa and Okhla contain more recoverable material than most open-pit mines. Construction debris piles up faster than it can be crushed; methane seeps from decomposing waste; treated water drains back into a dying river. Even the air carries residues of lost value and the smoke of crop stubble that could have become compressed fuel or fertiliser. In a circular city these are resources; in Delhi they are symptoms. Small experiments can show what could be. In the city’s south, a municipal crusher turns demolished concrete into gravel for roadbeds. A few biogas plants convert kitchen scraps into methane for buses. The logic is straightforward: waste that once cost money to bury now earns it. Yet these pockets of circulation remain isolated because policy still rewards disposal, not reuse. Procurement rules even today favour virgin material, not recycled; landfill contracts profit from volume, not reduction. The economy of waste persists because waste itself has been fitted into a profitable policy.
Circularity is not a moral gesture anymore, but it is an established productivity strategy. Every residual loop, rubble recycled, methane captured, sewage reused means fewer imports, lower emissions and more jobs. However, A circular city needs choreography and evidence starting from data on material flows, cross-sector incentives, and markets where residuals can be traded like any other commodity.
Some Indian cities are edging in that direction. Pune’s waste-picker cooperatives already form a functioning circular network, diverting thousands of tonnes from dumps daily. Surat reuses much of its industrial effluent; Chennai is testing wastewater desalination. The national imagination however remains linear. Success is still measured in kilometres of new roads or tonnes of waste “processed,” never in how much is reused. The next phase of India’s urban development will depend on changing that metric.
The economics of circularity is clear. If even a quarter of Delhi’s waste were looped back into production, the city could cut energy demand and emissions by double digits. The politics and policy however need to be reimagined. It also requires recognising the people who already keep the city’s residual economy alive such as the informal recyclers who sort, clean and sell its detritus. They are Delhi’s unacknowledged circular workers, extracting value from waste every dawn while the city sleeps. The deeper obstacle is psychological. Modern India still equates modernity with the new, the fresh, the shiny, the unused. Circularity asks for something humbler: intelligence over novelty, design over scale. It means treating waste not as guilt but as potential, pollution not as failure but as feedback. In a culture that prizes acceleration, learning to loop may be the hardest virtue.
Yet the alternative is visible in the air itself. Each particle of Delhi’s haze is a micro-residual: a bit of carbon that could have been energy, a grain of soil that could have stayed in the field. The city’s smog is its economy speaking in another language, telling us exactly where it leaks. To clear that air is to redesign the system that made it. The outlines of such a Delhi are already faintly there. A city where demolished buildings supply their own replacements; where kitchen waste powers public transport; where treated water cools industrial parks, where the poorest recyclers are recognised as entrepreneurs of efficiency. Growth, in that city, would no longer mean burning more but wasting less.
When the winter wind finally shifts and the haze lifts for a day, the capital briefly reappears and its domes and towers will be washed in weak sunlight, its roads suddenly sharp. For a moment, you can almost imagine another kind of city rising behind the smog: one that feeds on its own ingenuity rather than its own exhaustion.
The article was published with The Statesman on November 15, 2025.
(Amit Kapoor is chair and Meenakshi Ajith is development policy lead, Institute for Competitiveness. X: @kautiliya).
