Air Pollution brings Delhi to a halt.

Hello and you're listening to the Marketplace Morning Report live from the BBC World Service.

I'm Leanna Burren.

Thanks for tuning in.

In Delhi, air pollution has hit severe levels, non-essential construction, including public projects, such as roads, bridges and power lines have been suspended.

Office workers have been asked to work from home and other measures have been

taken as the BBC's South Asia correspondent Samir Hussein told me.

Schools are going to be closed from now until November 10th. All construction has come to a halt.

In fact, just driving around the city,

you can see all of these construction vehicles

and construction workers that aren't doing anything because of these

pollution levels and there are all kinds of other economic impacts you see that

there are many people that have been told that they have to work from home. In fact, 50% of private and public

businesses have been mandated to work from home. But the problem is, is of course, lots of

workers in Delhi are what we call day laborers. So especially within

the realm of construction, these are people that make money by going to work on a daily basis

and get paid on a daily basis.

And that already is a huge economic impact for those individuals.

Now one scientific journal actually put the economic cost of pollution,

we had a 1.06% hit to the overall GDP.

And that was a study that was done three years ago and pollution levels have increased and so you can

imagine that that economic impact may have increased as well.

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