Delhi chokes on foul air

Delhi chokes on foul air

By Deepak Parvatiyar*

Published in Norwegian newspaper Bistandsaktuelt on page 35 in 7 December 2017 issue 

https://www.bistandsaktuelt.no/globalassets/pdf-utgaver/bistandsaktuelt-1707.pdf

And Bistandsaktuelt website:
https://www.bistandsaktuelt.no/arkiv-kommentarer/2017/sa-gjor-vi-sa/

There was a bit of chill in the air and visibility was as low as hardly 50 meters in India’s capital city New Delhi on November 7 this year. A Tanzanian friend new to the Delhi clime exclaimed in joy: “When you see this you know winter is around the corner!”

Of course during this time of the year, fogs and dews were so delightfully welcomed in this part of the world. But they have gradually given way to deadly smog. For long mustiness has replaced early morning freshness. Ask this to any ‘Delhiite’ and he knows he lives in such morbid conditions.  

Obviously my friend’s moment of joy was as transitory as life itself in this gas chamber called Delhi. After all, it was not cold or fog in Delhi. It was smog because of 'air lock'. Air was moving at the speed of 2-3 km only. Hence the pollution wasn’t getting swept and was hanging low. Soon we were to also learn that only a day earlier, Delhi had just broken the record of the great London smog of 1952! And that worse was yet to come!

The irony is that with the placebo of ill-conceived regulation in place to ‘check’ deadly pollution, we keep behaving like the malaise is gone. That's exactly how a placebo is supposed to make us feel, but then, the infliction returns. According to a city-based NGO, The Centre for Science and Environment, the city’s air quality was the worst that it had seen in 17 years. Actually this was the third year in a row that air pollution had become ‘severe’ in the Indian capital, which meant it seriously impacted even healthy people!

I recall that even during our college days in mid-eighties, we used to have burning sensation in our eyes on Delhi roads because of pollution. I remember one of my college professors then often blaming Delhi’s topography – the landlocked Indian capital city sits in a natural bowl -- for trapping pollution.  

The city’s struggle with poor air quality continued in the 1990s too despite shifting some heavy industry to the outskirts, raising emissions standards for vehicles, and promoting compressed natural gas as alternative fuel for vehicles. The Delhi Transport Corporation was the first in the world to use CNG for its buses!  Much later, in 1998, the Central Government also constituted an Environment Pollution (Prevention and Control) Authority for the National Capital Region in compliance with a Supreme Court of India order. But media reports often exposed flouting of EPCA’s dust control norms, but to no avail.

The residents of India’s capital city, political heavyweights and commoners alike, are apparently cursed with severely compromised air. All these years, airborne pollution in the city has rarely stayed within safe levels. The only difference this time though, was that it portends a catastrophe.

In plain words, the city’s pollution levels were simply off the charts. Just consider that on 8^th November, Particulate Matter (PM) 2.5 particles touched a high of 603 microgram/cubic meter as against the WHO safe limit of 60! The PM10 particles in atmosphere were 887 microgram/cubic meter as against the standard 100 on 9^th November!  (A WHO report of 2013 says the particulate matter component of air pollution is most closely associated with increased cancer incidence, especially cancer of the lung!)

Indeed as we have seen in the past, while governments thrive on adhocism.  This time too, it is no different.  For a brief period, the Delhi Government declared the city in a public health emergency state. It temporarily shut construction sites and coal-fired power station. Schools were shut down for three days too. Issue of stubble burning by farmers in neighbouring states, considered a major cause of pollution in Delhi, was taken up in the Court…and so on. But then, there is an old saying -- dig the well before you’re thirsty. As usual, we keep blaming politicians for our predicament…and the blame game too is on.

But the question remains how can we let Delhi breathe? The image of my asthmatic maternal grandmother gasping for breath continues to haunt me all these years. She breathed her last as she suffered from breathlessness in a city to which she had just returned after many years in 2001! Like several others’, Delhi’s toxic air had claimed her life too.  This time, my concern is the health of my old parents, my wife with respiratory ailment, and my daughter! So I did take precaution by buying masks, and vitamin C tablets. But how can we reconcile to the truth that as residents of Delhi, we are the born prisoners of foul air? All that we could do is to quote TS Eliot’s classic, The Hollow Men –

“This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”

*The writer is a New Delhi based journalist and documentary film maker