Air pollution in India has assumed endemic proportions and brooks no complacency. With a World Health Organisation study ranking Delhi as the world’s most polluted city and identifying 13 of the world’s 20 most polluted cities as being in India, we ought to sit up and act on a war footing.
Last year, the Environmental Preference Index ranked India 174 out of 178 countries for air quality, reflecting the dismal performance in this sector. Evidently, this has been the case for so long without our batting an eyelid.
There is a sense of apathy that is amazing, considering that our lives and our future are involved. Hardly any one takes the central and state governments to task.
That Prime Minister Narendra Modi has launched the National Air Quality Index initially covering 10 cities is laudable but the government’s responsibility does not end with identifying the levels of pollution and expressing alarm. It must proactively devise ways to reduce air pollution levels in our cities rather than merely sensitising the people at large to the need to do something to avert catastrophic consequencies.
Just as much as productivity of labour in India is among the lowest in the world and needs to be stepped up, the air pollution levels need to be controlled on a war footing. A fact that cannot be ignored, except at our peril, is that the life span of the average Indian is reduced by 3.2 years due to India’s poor air quality, as a study undertaken by economists and public policy experts from the Energy Policy Institute at Chicago, Yale and Harvard University has revealed.
The situation in India is only worsening with each passing year and doubtless, we are bequeathing to our future generations much harder times than we are living in now.
It is a sad commentary on the callous attitude of our political dispensation and our persistent neglect of our environmental concerns that the data we are now planning to put out in 10 major cities has been available to us for years and we made virtually no use of it. There can be little doubt that at this rate, a time bomb is ticking away for us.
The Air Quality Index shows that among the 10 cities currently tested, only Hyderabad, Ahmedabad and Mumbai are within tolerable levels of air pollution. Some of the worst dust particulate matter cities are Bengaluru, Kanpur, Pune, Varanasi, Delhi, Chennai and Faridabad.
Vehicular pollution, especially in cities, is a major culprit, but there are toxic levels of air pollution in villages too, though for different reasons. Fuel adulteration, vehicle emission and traffic congestion play havoc in cities, but the remedial action is nowhere near the levels required to meet the crisis situation.
In 2005, India adopted the emission standard of Bharat Stage IV for vehicles, which is equivalent to Euro IV European standards for vehicle emissions. Nevertheless, pre-2005 vehicles and even pre-1992 vehicles are still on Indian streets. The pollution control tests for vehicles were at one time done scrupulously, but there is laxity now in enforcing those too. The blame lies at the door of states, but the ‘chalta hai’ attitude pervades the scene.
Some Indian taxis and auto-rickshaws run on adulterated fuel blends. Adulteration of petrol and diesel with lower-priced fuels is common in South Asia, including India. Some adulterants increase emissions of harmful pollutants from vehicles, worsening urban air pollution.
Financial incentives arising from differential taxes are generally the primary cause of fuel adulteration. In India and other developing countries, petrol carries a much higher tax than diesel, which in turn is taxed more than kerosene meant as a cooking fuel, while some solvents and lubricants carry little or no tax.
As fuel prices rise, the public transport driver cuts costs by blending the cheaper hydrocarbon into highly taxed hydrocarbon. The blending may be as much as 20-30 per cent. Adulterated fuel increases tailpipe emissions of hydrocarbons (HC), carbon monoxide (CO), oxides of nitrogen (NOx) and particulate matter (PM).—courtesy Wikipedia)
In villages, the major sources of air pollution are fuel and biomass burning. In autumn and winter months, large scale crop residue burning in agriculture fields – a low cost alternative to mechanical tilling – is a major source of smoke, smog and particulate pollution.
India has a low per capita emission of greenhouse gases, but the country as a whole, is the third largest in this after China and the United States. A 2013 study on non-smokers has found that Indians have 30 per cent lower lung function compared to Europeans.
Some reports, including one by the WHO, claim 300,000 to 400,000 people die of indoor air pollution and carbon monoxide poisoning in India because of biomass burning and use of chullahs.
Air pollution is also the main cause of the Asian brown cloud, which is delaying the start of the monsoon.
Burning of biomass and firewood will not stop, unless electricity or clean burning fuel and combustion technologies become readily available and are widely adopted in rural and urban India.
All in all, there is no escape from drastic measures to control air pollution in India. Any further laxity on that could be suicidal for this country.
