Bad air has kept its date with the capital. Last month, the Delhi government began implementing the Graded Action Plan — a combination of punitive and preventive measures. Echoing its claims of the past few years, it talked of a plan to take care of an emergency. Now that the emergency is at hand, the Delhi government appears at sea.
It has asked primary schools to remain shut till Monday and enforced a ban on construction activity. The Delhi government has also done the right thing by reinforcing the city’s public transport. Even so, it appears to be betraying an all too familiar lack of control over the city’s air quality. The IMD has forecast unfavourable weather conditions — low wind speed, non-conducive wind direction and lack of rain – for another three days and medical experts have flagged public health concerns. In response, Delhi’s environment minister Gopal Rai has reportedly raised the bogey of polluted air entering Delhi from neighbouring states. “Sources outside Delhi cause twice the amount of pollution,” he said.
Pollution levels have indeed crossed the CPCB’s “severe” category — or are close to it — in several cities in the capital’s neighbourhood. There is a sense of deja vu even in that. It’s high time, therefore, that a coordination mechanism between Delhi and neighbouring states is put in place to clean up the region’s air. Before 2022, Delhi’s Aam Admi Party (AAP) government would blame the fumes from stubble burning in neighbouring Haryana and Punjab for the capital’s annual misery.
AAP’s assumption of office in Punjab, last year, raised hopes of an arrangement to wean farmers off the environmentally-harmful practice. Data does show an appreciable reduction in stubble burning in Haryana. However, farm fires from Punjab continue to add to Delhi’s pollution load.
According to Indian Agriculture Research Institute Data, Punjab saw more than 1,900 instances of stubble burning on Wednesday — the fourth consecutive day when the count was more than 1,000. The intense burning season has just begun and experts fear a further deterioration of air quality.
In recent years, several studies have joined the dots between pollution and public health. Last year, a Lancet study estimated that India lost 1.67 million people in 2019 to diseases caused by inhaling hazardous amounts of PM 2.5. In September, an Air Quality Life Index prepared by the University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Institution reckoned that pollution by these fine particles reduces the average Indian’s life expectancy by more than five years. Researchers who worked on the study estimated that people in Delhi lose close to 12 years because of the poor air they breathe.
The AAP has rightly made people’s welfare its credo. Health and education have a prominent place in the party’s governments in Delhi and Punjab. Unfortunately, however, the pollution-health connection continues to elude the two governments.
