When Delhi’s air turns toxic, the advice comes quickly and routinely: work from home, stay indoors, reduce exposure. The guidance feels self-evident. If the air outside is dangerous, staying inside must surely be safer. The problem is that this advice is incomplete — and, in many homes, quietly misleading.

Work from home (WFH) does help. But only under conditions that are rarely explained, poorly understood, and almost never communicated to the public. Without those conditions, WFH can create a false sense of protection: exposure shifts indoors, but pollution does not disappear. In fact, it often accumulates.

That is a reality Delhi needs to confront. The intuition is comforting and simple. Traffic emissions are high, commuting is risky, and staying home avoids both. Therefore, staying home must be protective.

This belief echoes another assumption Delhi once held — that if traffic slowed and factories paused, the city would breathe easier. The lockdown shattered that illusion. Roads emptied, economic activity stopped, yet pollution persisted. We learned, painfully, that Delhi’s air problem was not just about visible activity, but about deeper atmospheric chemistry and regional dynamics.

WFH suffers from the same misunderstanding. It reduces one exposure pathway — commuting — but it does not neutralise polluted air itself. In a city where secondary particulate matter dominates, pollution is regional, persistent, and formed in the atmosphere. It does not remain neatly outdoors waiting to be avoided.

When you stay home, you do not escape polluted air. You merely change........

© News18