OUR GREEN WORRIES ARE AT ‘SEVERE’
Afew days back, a newspaper reported that Delhi’s air quality had improved from ‘Dangerous’ to ‘Very Poor’, and because of a western disturbance was likely to improve further to ‘Poor’ in the next few days. The explanation was given without a hint of irony, and said in clear terms that ‘poor’ is an acceptable condition in the city.
In 2016, India was ranked in the Global Environmental Performance Index (EPI) at 141 out of 180 countries. Two years hence, with standards falling further, the country dropped another 36 notches to 177th out of 180. Swachh Bharat has hit rock bottom, and is now recognised the world over as one of the filthiest places on Earth. When 14 of the world’s 15 most polluted cities are in India and rising, even amongst the poorest countries, India is the dirtiest. Our neighbour lives in only slightly less deplorable conditions. Pakistan comes in at 169 on the EPI index.
In the United Nation’s scale of livability, most Indian cities rank close to the bottom. With 89 of our major cities and towns facing dangerous levels of air quality, deaths related to air pollution reached an all-time high of 1.2 million people last year (says a study by medical journal Lancet). Certainly pollution from vehicle emissions, construction and industrial discharge contributed a sizeable load to the city air, but recent additives to the urban atmosphere are more lethal, and come in the form of plastics, rubber and polycarbonates. Absence of available firewood lead many poor migrants to burn Styrofoam, tyres and plastic to stay warm, adding a 20-fold increase in dangerous chemical levels to the air.
Similarly, water toxicity with high coliform levels is acceptable in India and is often even present in municipal piped water to homes. Large swathes of urban populations—especially unskilled labour clustered around industries in smaller cities rely on hand pumps for domestic use. There, incidence of bladder, kidney, lung and liver cancer is ten times higher than in those areas with a regulated water supply. Some 34 years after the Union Carbide disaster where 4,000 people died, the plant continues to wreak havoc in the surrounding community by other means.
While the earlier generation had suffered the effects of the pesticide gas methyl isocyanate, their children must suffer stunted growth, palsy, shrunken limbs and paralysis—all the results of poisonous groundwater.
It hardly needs stating that India is now an amusement park for alarming ecological statistics and sights. With noxious suds appearing across Bengaluru waterways, dangerous antibiotic
Swachh Bharat has hit rock bottom, and is now recognised the world over as one of the filthiest places on Earth
residues and microbes in the soil around Hyderabad, red coloured lead poisoned rivers in industrial belts, toxic lakes catching fire, vast stretches of coal dust and fumes across Madhya Pradesh, and garbage dumps outside most metropolises smoldering and stinking, the value of adopting clean measures seems to be a pale mirage on the environmental horizon. For the government, it is easy to maintain that any water, air or food—contaminated or otherwise—is acceptable for a population that has no access to basic resources. Better a stunted population at death’s door, than a happier impoverished one.
A serious drawback of India’s environmental policy is its formulation outside of conventional development, and vice versa. The signal of a progressive future relies on the country upping its consumption patterns along Western lines and, consequently, facing the same problems. Without a serious plan of action to tackle pollution, cities will continue to rely on the western disturbance to clean the air, and already scarce potable water will become a commodity for the rich. Unless development dovetails with ecological norms, catastrophic statistics are bound to rise and leave behind a ruin caused by indifference and self-destruction.
Speaking recently at the Climate Change conference in Poland, naturalist Sir David Attenborough concluded, “We are faced now with the extinction of many species and perhaps the end of civilisation.” Given such a pessimistic view from a once eternal optimist, that end seems to have already begun in India.