The Supreme Court’s flagellation of the Commission on Air Quality management on September 27 was fully deserved, but the real question remains; how is that, or anything else, including the Delhi’s government’s tired annual Winter Action Plan announced September 25, going to reduce air pollution peaks in the upcoming winter?
The signs are already ominous. After three months of “moderate” and “satisfactory” AQI levels and nearly a month of the cleanest air quality that New Delhi and most of north India has seen this year, air pollution rose sharply these past few days, foretelling impending annual peaks – and concomitantly increasingly harming the health of nearly half a billion Indians residing in the Indo-Gangetic plain.
The extended period of rains this year gave north Indians a slightly longer respite, but with the south-westerly monsoons receding now, it’s going to be back to the usual high PM2.5 levels that the landlocked Indo-Gangetic suffers through its toxic winters, year after year. Some air pollution scientists are even predicting that average pollution levels in the upcoming winter will be much worse than in previous years. But freak weather patterns of meteorology, temperatures, wind and humidity can change things unexpectedly, they add.
New Delhi saw AQI rise to 174 last week from under 50 after the last rain the week before. This number is increasing daily and crossed 360 earlier this week on a relatively cooler day with no rain and hardly any wind. Friday’s AQI was “poor” at 273 and Saturday was “very poor” at 303, according to the government’s SAFAR app.
India’s capital is seen as the ground zero of global air pollution because its levels of microscopic particulate matter is among the highest in the world. PM2.5 is so tiny that it is easily able to bypass the body’s natural defences and gets absorbed via the lungs into the bloodstream to reach and damage every organ. Exposure to this air pollution is equal to losing nearly twelve years of life expectancy, studies say. But experts have often pointed out that there are many areas in north India that are much more polluted than Delhi, but due to lack of precise measurement, slip under the radar.
The National Capital Region is the most closely measured and monitored compared to other urban centres with high population density. Continuous Ambient Air Quality Monitoring Stations (CAAQMS), among the most precise machines used to measure pollution, are expensive. India has roughly 374 monitors, roughly 11% of the 3,500 that are needed to cover the entire country, and most of these are mainly concentrated around a few metro cities. The National Capital Region has almost 10% of the total.
Farm fires have begun – but are still not contributing to sharply rising NCR pollution
Apart from the usual suspects (industrial, vehicular, garbage and biomass burning emissions), the specific concern at present is that the AQI has sharply worsened even before smoke from a single farm fire has contributed anything significant to this increase. This isn’t because farmers haven’t started burning crop stubble – satellite images show that they have. But at present, wind direction (being south-westerly) is still favourable to blowing all this smoke away from north India’s areas of high population density.
This just goes to prove that local emissions are a large part of the background pollution load and current increases in ambient pollution levels are the effect of receding monsoon winds and falling temperatures. When nature isn’t washing or blowing away particulate matter, man-made pollution is in full display – and going by data, it is only going to get worse in coming days.
Within the next couple of weeks, wind direction will change, bringing more anthropogenic pollution – in the form of smoke from burning fields in neighbouring states – directly to urban centres in the National Capital Region, and into the lungs of the 46 million people living there. From this point, things are likely to spiral downwards, like they do every year. Despite bans, like every year, this year’s Diwali firecrackers will add their own toxins around November 1, smothering the north Indian plains with hazardous levels of pollution (post-Diwali PM2.5 has been recorded to peak at 3,000 microns), which will stay with some troughs and peaks till nature comes to the rescue in January with winds, rains and rising temperatures.
Also read: Doctors Advising Kids, Vulnerable Populations To Leave Delhi-NCR Due to Toxic Air
This is why although the Supreme Court has pulled up the CAQM sharply over its lack of any concrete effort to curb stubble burning in neighbouring states of Punjan and Haryana, no significant changes are likely. Crop stubble burning at its peak can contribute upto 30% of the pollution load of adjoining cities. But farmers are a political tinderbox for all political parties. For example, the Aam Aadmi Party, which spent years blaming the Congress Party for not restraining farmers from burning crop residue when it was in power in Punjab, is now strangely silent – because its own party’s government is equally unable to restrain crop residue burning. Neither political party has been able to solve this problem, one which ironically affects the health of the farmers burning crop stubble the most – after all, they are the first responders to inhale the smoke from their burning farms before it even wafts to urban centres. Similarly, despite bans and so-called “green” firecrackers, Diwali smoke will add to this toxic cocktail, unless miraculously, sincere police action this winter sees strong enforcement.
But before these layers of contributors add to the rising AQI, it is very clear that the base level of pollution – the background pollution load upon on which the seasonal contributors like stubble burning, firecrackers, and biomass fires for heating in the coldest past of the winter stack up – is already high. These come from local emissions and data shows that all indicators are going up – sales and consumption of diesel, petrol, coal, imports of petcoke – all industrial and vehicular activity is increasing.
“If you just take Delhi today – 20 million people, 10 million cars, 20,000 tonnes of waste, increasing construction, burning brick kilns – nothing has changed on the ground that could lead to reduced emissions. There has been no behaviour change either. So why would the base pollution load decline? It’s just going up.”
These words are from a data scientist who has been tracking India’s pollution for nearly 25 years and predicts another highly polluted north Indian winter.
We could analyse the futility of the latest winter action plan – each year, a few new dramatic steps are added to the existing reactive, ad hoc bandaid measures and announced just before stubble burning season – but that would be unproductive. This year’s 21-step plan includes deploying drones to monitor pollution hot spots, creating artificial rain and instituting “green” awards in addition to the tried (and failed) steps of road rationing, construction dust mitigation, smog guns or the emergency “Graded Response Action Plan” none of which address an actual reduction of emissions at source.
Equally unconstructive would be highlighting the smog towers Delhi set up at public cost to manage pollution, which lie practically defunct, outdoor air purifiers that citizen groups had advocated against, noting that they were unsupported by science, which said such measures are ineffective and inefficient. As far as the National Clean Air Programme is concerned, the less said the better – its targets to lower pollution have never been legally binding, and now, a new report by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) has shown that five years into the programme, less than one percent of NCAP funds were spent on controlling toxic emissions from industry. Around 40% of funds out of Rs.10,566.47 crores remain unused, with the remaining spent largely on mitigation via actions amounting to dust management: paving roads, covering potholes, and deploying mechanical sweepers and water sprinklers – another useless waste of public money.
Also read: Who Is Accountable for the Disease and Death India’s Deadly Air Pollution Triggers?
National public health emergency – but still no focus on emission reduction
As someone who has been tracking pollution closely for nearly 10 years through atmospheric scientists, air pollution analysts and public health researchers who analyse economic, geographical, meteorological and health data to understand the human cost of air pollution, it never ceases to amaze me how lightly the quality of human life – and death – is taken in India. Air pollution is a national public health emergency that kills more people annually in India than Covid did in its most virulent form. Even China, equally populous – and once, equally polluted – has managed to significantly bring down its severely high levels of air pollution. But the Indian government doesn’t treat pollution as a public health hazard – just compare its pollution awareness and communication strategy as compared to what it did with Covid when one couldn’t make a phone call without clear, concise information on the disease and how to protect from it.
So, to come back to the original question: how is the Supreme Court’s pulling up of the CAQM or yet another weak Winter Action Plan with its 21-point reactive band-aid measures going to save north India from another toxic winter? Well, it’s not. There is nothing in there that focuses on systemic reforms to actually reduce emissions at source. The Supreme Court’s effort is laudable, but it is clear that without the cooperation of the executive, it is finding even its attempt to reduce exposure, challenging. The Court can issue directives, but it is up to the state, its politicians and bureaucrats (especially the police) to ensure zero-tolerance enforcement of existing laws, or even penalise polluters.
So, until we reach a tipping point, just gird up for another toxic winter with higher pollution peaks, smarting eyes, stinging throat, respiratory distress and long term harm including strokes, heart attacks and cancers. For winter 2024, it will be back to focussing on mitigation and protection, reducing personal exposure by wearing masks and using purifiers, or best of all, fleeing the geographically and meteorologically cursed northern plains for the sunnier south or sheltering somewhere on India’s long (and preferably less population-dense) coastline where Nature can protect through wind, rain and sun.
Jyoti Pande Lavakare is a journalist and the author of Breathing Here is Injurious to Your Health: The Human Cost of Air Pollution.