AIR POLLUTION: THE GREAT EQUALIZER
In this excerpt from her new book, environmentalist Sunita Narain writes about the awful smog choking not just Delhi but all our cities
‘I deny that particulate matter is resulting in total excess deaths per year.’
‘I deny that particulate matter is more deadly for the fact that they are breathed deep into the lungs and lodge there.’
‘I deny that the smaller the particle is, the more harmful it is.’
—Tata Engineering and Locomotive Company’s Affidavit at the Supreme Court, 1999
Iremember the day as if it was yesterday. It was April 1999 and I was at my first press conference. It had been organized to tell the world that we had received a legal notice from Tata Motors for a whopping Rs 100 crore. This was over an article that my late colleague Anil Agarwal and I had written, talking about toxins emitted by diesel vehicles that were dangerous to our health. Anil had fallen ill. He had asked me to handle the press. I was faced with what I can only describe as a hostile group — Tata was a respected business house; Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) was unknown at that time, while I was even lesser known.
My message was: Diesel vehicles emit fine particles... Our conclusion was: Cars should not use diesel. Buses should shift to compressed natural gas (CNG), which emits much lower levels of PM 10 and PM 2.5. The government should rapidly and urgently clean up the quality of fuel and improve vehicle technologies.
At the press conference, our message to Tata Motors was clear: Take us to court. We will not back down... When I look back, I realize that the press conference was a turning point in our work... Interestingly, the very next day, Tata Motors wrote to us saying that they were withdrawing their legal notice.
This was the time when Delhi’s air was foul, black and poisonous. My colleagues at the CSE had spent over a year trying to understand the cause of pollution in the city. The book that was an outcome of the research, Slow Murder, set the problem out in detail. It found that there had been an explosion in the number of vehicles on the road... This, combined with the fact that there was absolutely no standard for the quality of fuel or limits on vehicle emissions, meant that the air of the national capital was toxic...
BREATHLESS IN DELHI
Flash forward to November 2016. Fifteen years later, Delhi’s air turned so black that even the most sceptical became breathless. It was literally ‘death by breath’. There was no question that Delhi faced a public health emergency because of its deteriorating air quality. Why had the air in Delhi become so bad and what could be done to combat this hazardous pollution?
In the winters of 2015 and 2016, Delhi’s air was classified as ‘severely polluted’ for over 65 per cent of the days in November, December and January. According to the government’s own air quality index, this meant that the pollution was so bad that it would cause ‘respiratory effects even on healthy people’. In the winter of 2016, the season started with a toxic bang — the level of particulate matter in the city was more than fourteen to sixteen times the safe limit. It was even worse than the infamous London smog of 1952... This situation is neither new nor unusual...
The fact is that most of India is getting progressively more polluted — the air is just as foul in several other cities as it is in Delhi; it is just that these are not monitored... Let us be clear about one fact — air pollution is a great equalizer. The middle class in the city... can buy air purifiers and believe that we have protected ourselves and our children from bad air. But this is not enough. We will have to take a breath outside our protected bubbles at some time or another...
It is also clear that Delhi cannot clean up only its own air and let the rest of India... continue to live in polluted conditions. The airshed is one and the movement of wind enables pollution to travel from one place to another. The only viable alternative is to clean the air for all.
And that is the real challenge... If we improve the quality of fuel used in cars, but not the fuel used in factories or thermal power plants, it will not work. Similarly, we must have strategies to incentivize farmers not to burn their crop residues. But they will do more if we do more. Delhi cannot simply blame farmers when its own track record of enforcing steps to combat pollution is so poor. This is why air pollution control demands collective, persistent and tough effort.
The question is whether we will get our act together to do what needs to be done.