Through visualization techniques that attempt to place Delhi's air, the question of scale in environmental governance is constantly brought up. Maps and charts display various scalar attachments to air. It is clear to everyone that state governments must collaborate. But how would such collaboration look like under current political regimes? What would it tell about federal relations within a postcolonial nation-state?
Further, the scale at which air is monitored influences the type of pollution-health link being drawn. Air monitored through surface-level, expensive machines that cost thousands of dollars each assume an "airshed" which erases unequal breathing exposures. Air monitored through the individual body, however, confronts problems of abstraction, extrapolation, representativeness, and reproducibility. Place-making and body-making processes are thoroughly interlocked through uncertainities in knowing about air. How do scientific ways of knowing and placing grapple with such difficult problems?
