Delhi’s pollution problem cries for solution

With the onset of winter, India’s capital, New Delhi, is once again in the news for its mounting level of air pollution.

Every October air quality drops sharply not only in the capital city and the National Capital Region, which includes contiguous urban areas of adjacent states, but the entire Gangetic plains from Punjab to Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. The situation begins to ease by the following February.

The most common causes of air and water pollution around the world are emission of gases and discharge of effluents by industries.

The situation worsens in winter as the season begins with some major religious festivals. A part of Indian tradition for millennia, these festivals posed no pollution threat until recently.

The explosive growth of population is one of the reasons why festivities are raising pollution levels. One hundred years ago, the Indian subcontinent had a population of only about 318 million. Now India alone has a population of 1.35 billion. In other words, there are many more celebrants and they leave behind much more pollutants.

Various other factors like industrial activity and urbanisation have also contributed to rise in pollution in the past century.

According to the Delhi authorities, the city folks are not responsible for all the pollution. Just before the festivals it is harvest time in the neighbouring states. When farmers burn stubble in the fields, Delhi’s air gets polluted too.

Festivals and farm operations cannot be done away with. All concerned must give serious thought to ways of checking pollution caused by them.

India is now going through a phase of rapid urbanisation. Old cities are growing and new ones are coming up. Authorities in most cities, including Delhi, have been slow in addressing the problems of urban growth. As a result living conditions im the cities have been steady deteriorating.

Delhi has multiple authorities: a municipal committee for New Delhi, a Corporation for Delhi city, and a government with only limited powers for Delhi state. Above them all is the government of India, which has a direct stake in Delhi as it functions from there.

More than any of these authorities, the Supreme Court, which too functions from there, stands out in people’s minds as an institution that does what it can to address the city’s grave pollution problem. At one stage it intervened decisively and phased out old, highly polluting motor vehicles from the city’s roads.

In the eight years Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been in office, he does not appear to have seen Delhi’s pollution problem as one that merits high priority.

In 2020, a Swiss agency, which publishes a global air quality index every year, sad Delhi had been the world’s most polluted capital for three years in a row. That did not persuade the Modi regime to clean up the city.

The following year the agency reported an improvement in the situation in Delhi. This was the result of the lockdown imposed by the government to check the spread of the pandemic.

Studies by domestic agencies showed that there was remarkable improvement in the quality of both air and water in the cities during the lockdown.

A lesson that could be drawn from these studies was that the cities could be saved in a short period by effectively checking industrial pollution.

Most of Delhi’s industries and public utilities like power stations and transport buses are big polluters. Their modernisation will help reduce pollution levels.

The Modi regime is now engaged in rebuilding a part of Lutyens’ Delhi according to its own lights in great secrecy. Giving priority to such schemes when the pollution problem is crying for solution shows poor judgment.

Experts who have an understanding of Delhi’s pollution problem have offered many suggestions on ways to tackle it. One of them is that an effective solution can be found only if the entire Gangetic plains is viewed as one unit. It follows that the Central government alone can find a lasting solution to the problem.