The heavy hand with which the Delhi police dealt with a small but rightfully agitated crowd, which had gathered at India Gate the other day to express concern about the city’s deteriorating air quality index hovering near 400, tells its own tale. Such concerns require public engagement by the authorities, not intimidation. Yet, the authorities saw it as a political threat and dealt with it in what has now become a copybook fashion. The deteriorating air quality in winter is often discussed as a Delhi-centric issue, but the fact remains that even our rigged and scant air-monitoring stations have revealed a continuous zone of foul air from Chandigarh to Mumbai. The World Health Organization (WHO) has released a list of ‘the world’s 20 most polluted cities’, of which 14 are in India. The organisation reported that nine out of 10 people in the world breathe polluted air and that 7 million deaths occur annually due to exposure to polluted air. This is as bad as it can get.
Against this backdrop, it must have been galling for the Modi government to be told by a lowly representative of the Chinese embassy that there were parallels between the air pollution crisis of both countries and Beijing stands ready ‘to share our journey towards blue ones’. Also, we have had Amitabh Kant and Kiran Bedi, two former bureaucrats closely associated with the government, who see the air pollution crisis as a national embarrassment requiring intervention at the highest level.
The Supreme Court of India, which is seized of the matter, has shown no urgency in holding the concerned authorities accountable. While one can acknowledge the institutional limitations of the judiciary in solving the complex, multifaceted problem as it requires long-term solutions from expert bodies and government action, surely the court can set timelines, like it did when it ordered the then Sheila Dixit government long back to switch the Delhi public transport to run on CNG, instead of diesel.
The Modi government must not make it a matter of prestige when it comes to taking help from outside if no solutions are available locally. China, on its part, had battled a similar crisis in 2013, infamously known as the ‘airpocalypse’. Measures then taken by the Chinese Communist Party-led government included banning new coal-run power plants, limiting car ownership and rolling out all-electric bus fleets. The government also cut down on iron and steel production and launched an afforestation programme with about 35 billion trees being planted across 12 provinces. With over $100 billion invested, China’s forestry spending per hectare exceeded that of the US and Europe, tripling the global average.
China’s 2013 environment policy – the Air Pollution Action Plan – led to Beijing’s PM 2.5 levels dropping to 33 per cent and a reduced concentration of particulate matter down to 35 per cent. A follow-up to this saw China launch a Three-Year Action Plan for Winning the Blue Sky War in 2018, which covered all cities and aimed to reduce PM2.5 levels by 18 per cent across cities. It also tackled ground-level ozone, a pollutant produced when volatile organic compounds react with nitrogen oxides and set a reduction target of 10 per cent for volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and 15 per cent for nitrogen oxides.
In India, it is well-known that emissions from industry, power generation, transport and agriculture circulate in the shared airshed. North India’s winter smog is the most visible part of a wider national crisis. Long-term analyses of particulate pollution, such as the Air Quality Life Index, have shown that unsafe air is now the norm for most of India – and that present regulation, monitoring and enforcement arrangements are insufficient across states and sectors. Treating the problem as a seasonal emergency, in the face of evidence pointing to a permanent condition demanding permanent institutions, has encouraged only bursts of action.
Today, authority is split among Central ministries, state departments, municipal bodies and specialised regulators – each with partial jurisdiction and mixed incentives. The Commission for Air Quality Management was created to address this fragmentation and is empowered to direct emissions control, coordinate among states and agencies and impose sanctions. Yet, its interventions have not matched the scale of the problem. Its task now is to use its mandate to require time-bound sectoral plans from governments and major emitters, track compliance through continuous monitoring, and ensure data is in the public domain. The focus should be on interventions in power, industry, transport, construction and agriculture, with tighter norms and real enforcement, time-bound retirement or retrofitting of polluting plants, support for cleaner fuels and technologies and credible alternatives for farmers burning crop residue. These solutions will take time to manifest, but only they will lead to lasting changes.