Air quality calls for year round effort

Air quality calls for year round effort

Air quality in India is poor, and takes a toll on human health — 1.67 million deaths in India, according to the latest State of the Air Report. It erodes health and the economy.

The damage to cardio-pulmonary health takes on added importance given the Covid pandemic. Little of this is new. What is new is US President Donald Trump’s ‘Look at India [along with China and Russia]. The air is filthy’ comment to defend his climate-change denial during the course of a presidential debate. The adverse impacts of poor air quality are irrefutable. It is time to act for a longterm solution to this problem.

The central government has stepped up air quality effort, moving from emergency response to proactive efforts through the National Clean Air Plan (NCAP). There are clear goals, financial allocations and collaborative effort between the environment ministry and the Central Pollution Control Board and cities with high pollution levels. The NCAP is not perfect but it is a good beginning. More can be done, such as enforcing stricter emission norms for thermal power stations.

The real reason for the lack of progress is that at the operational level of state governments, the approach continues to be a seasonal one. The unwillingness to address pollution problem as systemic problem requiring year round consistent effort makes tackling pollution akin to ER triage, with state governments, and even the public, demonstrating a predilection for silver bullets. So, Delhi’s smog towers or the ‘shut off engines at red lights’ campaign are flashy but not really effective in terms of ensuring better air quality all through the year. Blaming crop residue burning for the city’s poor air quality does not help — on some days during the ‘season’, crop burning accounts for under 10% of the pollution.

Acting decisively will require taking multiple measures — tackling pollution at source, such as through improved public transport for reducing vehicular emission, better planning of green cover to reduce dust, better regulation of construction and, most importantly, better implementation of norms.