The air pollution puzzle – Finding the missing pieces!

Dharmesh Shah

Last week, a special bench of the Supreme Court took suo motu cognisance of the deteriorating air quality in Delhi-NCR and directed various agencies to initiate emergency measures in the region. An important intervention, but it would be a mistake to imagine air pollution as Delhi’s problem alone and limit the scope of our understanding to particulate pollution only.

Delhi’s poor air quality is a corollary of deteriorating environmental health across the Indian sub-continent. A recent study found that 77% of India’s population is exposed to harmful levels of particulate matter and 1 in 8 deaths is linked to pollution. In fact, on most days during the annual smog events, Delhi does not even feature among the most polluted cities under National Air Quality Index (AQI).

A WHO report of the worst polluted cities in 2019 puts Delhi at the 8^th place after Gurugram, Ghaziabad, Faridabad, Bhiwandi, Noida, Patna and Lucknow. Furthermore, a 2009 assessment of critically polluted regions in the country identified 88 industrial clusters of which 43 were notified as critically polluted based on the health of the air, water and land. A majority of the critically polluted clusters are in Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh.

Despite the geographically diverse nature of the crisis, the Delhi bias dominates the narrative and attracts the most media, policy and research attention. Even in terms of monitoring infrastructure, of the 200 AQI stations the highest (37) are installed in the city of New Delhi alone. Korba in Chhattisgarh, which was declared the 5^th most critically polluted region by the Ministry of Environment and Forest (MoEF), lies barely 900 kms (aerial distance) from Delhi and does not have a single AQI station.

Similarly, Tamil Nadu, the third most industrialised state in the country, has been allocated just 5 stations, 4 of which are in the city of Chennai whereas critically polluted towns like Cuddalore and Tuticorin have none.

This scenario reflects a major gap in our understanding of the science and politics behind air pollution. A joint study published by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, California Institute of Technology, and NASA found that (industrial) emissions from China are making its way to the western United States via wind currents. In other words, air pollutants travel huge distances and Delhi cannot breathe easy if coal power plants in Korba continue to pollute. Moreover, there is an urgent need to break away from the Delhi bias and apply air pollution mitigation policies throughout the year across a larger geography.

Beyond Particulate Pollution

Air pollution experts have for long emphasised on the need to look beyond particulate pollution. Heavy metals and persistent organic pollutants or POPs are categories of pollutants also associated with activities like power generation, smelting, vehicular exhaust, mining and waste incineration. Research has linked heavy metal and POPs with a range of health impacts, including cancers, bone damage, elevated blood pressure, damage to the central and peripheral nervous systems, reproductive disorders, and disruption of the immune system.

Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) are yet another class of pollutants that have remained out of air pollution policy purview. VOCs are as prevalent as particulates, but due to lack of standards in India, their emissions remain unregulated. VOCs are released from burning fuel such as gasoline, wood, coal, or natural gas and when they combine with nitrogen oxides in the air, they form tropospheric, or ground level ozone. Breathing ozone can trigger a variety of health problems, including chest pain, coughing, throat irritation, and airway inflammation. Hence, it is crucial that our policies and science investigate beyond particulates.

India’s Environmental Track Record

In less than a month from today, the survivors of the Bhopal Gas Disaster will commemorate the 35^th anniversary of the tragedy. More than three and a half decades on, the idea of justice eludes the Bhopalis and the toxins left behind at the erstwhile Union Carbide factory continue to poison generations to come. In many ways, Bhopal stands testimony to the collective failure of our institutions to protect and heal our shared environmental fate. Or rather, a declaration of our commitment to the idea of economic growth at any cost.

There exists a direct co-relation between India’s economic aspirations and the degradation of its natural capital. For the government, a forest is only worth its timber and the mountain is only worth its ore. India has lost over 1.6 million hectares of tree cover during 2001-18, and during 2016-17 around 655.31 million tonnes of coal have been extracted from Indian coalfields^[1].

Our foremost environmental legislation, the Environmental Protection Act (EPA) of 1986, defines the term ‘Environment’ as water, air and land and the inter-relationship which exists among and between water, air and land, and human beings, other living creatures, plants, microorganism and property. In other words, what we do to the environment, we do to ourselves. Over the past half-decade, major amendments have been on the table to make prominent environmental laws more conducive to business.

Dilutions in the environmental laws have a direct connection with the deteriorating air quality in the country. Much like Bhopal, the ‘Delhi Smog’ is a reflection of a system ill designed to protect the environmental health of its citizens. Needless to say, systemic interventions would be needed in the long run to improve the state of the environment.

This is the second article in a multi-part series on air pollution.

Dharmesh Shah is a Kerala-based public policy analyst. Twitter: @dshah1983. Views are personal.