A year back, a 15-year-old girl sat outside
the Swedish Parliament with a placard, “Skolstrejk For Klimatet” (School
Strike for Climate). She was a lone figure then. Today, when she is blaming the
elders for the inevitability of the climate catastrophe, the world is listening
to her. The UK Parliament heard her saying, “You did not act in time.” In
November, this diminutive teen called, Greta Thunberg, addressing a youth
climate rally in Los Angeles, said: “The older generations are failing us. They
are failing future generations, but future generations do not have a voice and
the biosphere does not have a voice.” She then asked the rally, “Do you think
they are listening to us?” When the crowd shouted loudly, “No”, she replied
equally loudly, “Well, we will make them listen.”
And this has become
a primal and a personal reason for Greta to forge this new path. In her recent
address to delegates at the UN climate talks in Madrid, this 16-year old, who
has been recently named Time Magazine’s person of the year, questioned the
wisdom of the elders saying, “The biggest danger is not inaction. The real
danger is when politicians and chief executives make it look like action, when
in fact almost nothing is happening, apart from clever accounting and clever
PR.”
It is this kind of
loud voice that is what is now needed to address India’s air-pollution crisis
that is inflicting an incalculable toll on public health and economic growth.
Many credible studies have attempted to quantify the impact of air pollution. A
study carried out by IIT, Bombay estimated the cumulative economic cost for
Delhi alone by 2015 was $6.4 bn. In 2016, Delhi residents
experienced a deadly smog “with the particulate matter at 15 times higher than
the safe-levels”. In 2018, the World Health Organization declared Delhi the
most polluted city on the planet.
A long list of
air-quality indicators is painting a grim picture. There remained many more yet
to be quantified such as the extent to which the cognitive abilities of
children growing amidst such air pollution are adversely effected. Similarly,
we do not know the impact of loss of productivity of a person due to air
pollution on the dependent family members. All this is a sure pointer towards
the emergence of a greater threat from air pollution than what we have
comprehended so far.
In the first week
of November, Delhi was covered by toxic smog. It was so thick that flights were
to be cancelled. Local government announced closure of schools. Indeed, it
encompassed the whole of Indo-Gangetic plain. The position—AQI is exceeding
500—is getting worsened from year to year with the rise in consumption of dirty
fuel by the ancient trucks, tractors, autos, cars and two wheelers that clog
the newly laid out 4-lane roads, besides large scale biomass burning. Despite
such a grave situation, no matching response to counter the menace of
air-pollution is forthcoming from the government as well as the people. A
recent survey carried out by EnvEcoLogic group in Delhi covering about 5000
individuals across the nine districts of Delhi region revealed how poorly the
Delhiites are aware of the air pollution crisis and the regulations launched by
the government to curb its ill-effects: 35% respondents do not consider air
pollution in Delhi is an emergency; nearly 60% of respondents do not consider
indoor air pollution in cities as a threat to life; and 50% of people are not
aware that burning of garbage is banned and it attracts a penalty of Rs5000.
That being the
awareness of the people about the impending crisis—a ‘public health
emergency’—it is no wonder if the ‘command and control’ model adopted by our
policymakers to handle the pollution-related problems failed in delivering the
desired results. In other words, it tells us that mere framing top-down
policies with a hope that people would simply tow government’s line will not
give results till the people at the bottom are sensitized for a productive
bottom-up contribution as well.
For instance,
farmers in the rice-wheat cropping system of Punjab and Haryana states are
known to burn an estimated 35 million tons of rice residues during October 15
to November 15 of every year in order to prepare their fields for the next
wheat crop. But such burning, though cost-effective for farmers, causes
air-pollution. Indeed, it is identified as one of the man-made causes for the
worst air pollution that Delhi experiences. A mere top-down policy measure of
penalizing the farmers for such burning simply failed in arresting this
practice. For, a number of socioeconomic factors influence farmers’ residue
management decisions: if a farm is owner-operated and if he owns large number
of livestock he may resort to full residue removal by way of harvesting it for
cattle feed; on the other hand, if the turnaround time between the harvesting
of rice and the sowing of wheat is less, a farmer may resort to burning of the
residue. So, unless policymakers come up with technological innovations to make
rice residue removal and sowing of wheat crop less costly, farmers may continue
to do what they have been doing all along.
That is where the
need for leaders like that young Greta Thunberg is felt acutely to forge a
movement, a movement that could address Delhi’s air pollution crisis
effectively. For, such people-driven movements would be more powerful to bring
in the desired behavioural changes in the society at large: scientists will
address the underlying issues more diligently and come up with innovative
answers to the problems; media would give vent to the voices of all the
concerned by differentiating them into human frames, scientific frames, or
policy frames, and policymakers would be better armed with requisite
information to adopt right measures to mitigate the crisis, and people being
aware of the underlying reasons for the ‘public health emergency’ actively
participate in all the sustainable campaigns that are launched by the policy
makers.
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