Air pollution is deadly for our health | The Sunita Narain Show

What we now know is that air pollution is deadly for our health. This is no longer a question of debate. Most of us who live in the gas-chamber that our cities have become feel the pain of this air that is not fit to breathe. 

The question is what are we doing about this? This is where the news gets even more murky than the air we are forced to inhale. Let’s take stock and also understand why we are not winning this battle for blue skies and clear lungs. 

In 2019, the Union ministry of environment, forests and climate change (MoEF&CC) launched the National Clean Air Programme (NCAP) as it is called to fix the air quality of our cities. This move meant that instead of the Supreme Court driving action on air pollution, it would be the domain of government. 

It also took the fight on air pollution beyond the boundaries of Delhi and its neighbouring region — under NCAP targets for clean air were set for 131 cities, which were seen to be non-attainment cities because of high pollution load. 

Cities were required to reduce particulate concentration by 20-30 per cent by 2024 from the base year of 2017; this was revised to 40 per cent by 2025-26 from the base year of 2019-2020. All good you would say. 

Even better was the fact that the 15th Finance Commission provided direct grants to 42 cities and seven urban agglomerates with more than 1 million population for actions to control air pollution. MoEF&CC provided funds for the remaining cities — and with this some Rs 20,000 crore has been earmarked for the five-year period between 2019-20 to 2025-26. 

This is not all. Each state government and each city are required to make an action plan based on studies on the sources of pollution to decide the priority of action. The funding is performance linked and requires cities to show improvement in levels of pollution in the air; even an increase in the number of good air days — air quality index below 200 is taken as the benchmark. 

In 2022, MoEF&CC introduced a ranking called Swachh Vayu Survekshan to recognise the cities that had taken action to reduce deadly pollution. You would argue and you would be right that all the elements are here for us to reduce the burden of pollution in our air; we will soon have the air to breathe. 

But this is not the case. The fact is that in this focus on setting up the entire paraphernalia, the action that needs to be taken has been lost sight. My colleagues have taken a deep dive into the programme and have found the following. The most problematic is that NCAP measures only PM10 as the key pollutant; this means all action is linked to the control of PM10 and not PM 2.5 — which are tinier fractions of the particulate and widely indicted for the health burden of air pollution. 

The smaller the fraction the more these are respirable; so tiny that they even enter our blood stream, which is why high pollution is linked to heart diseases, not just asthma and lung problems.

 The fact also is that PM10 – the coarser particulates are dust related and it is also a fact that dust is not a pollutant, per se. Dust becomes a health problem when it is coated with the toxins that come from other sources, mainly combustion related sources like vehicle or industrial emissions.

It needs to be addressed, but not at the cost of taking hard and often inconvenient steps to reduce emissions from the growing number of vehicles on our roads; on the use of coal in industrial units without pollution measures; on the continued open burning of garbage in our cities and of course, the wickedest of all problems of the continued use of biomass for cooking food, what fouls up the air but also adds to the health burden of women. 

So, it should not surprise you to know that action is also linked to control of this one pollutant, dust — the most favoured of all because it belongs to no one in particular, unlike emissions from vehicles for which manufacturers would be held to account or from coal burning power plants where again power producers would be responsible. 

The review by my colleagues has found that 64 per cent of the money for air pollution control has been spent on road paving, road widening, pothole repair, water sprinkling and mechanical sweepers. However important the repair of road potholes may be, we who live in India know that these are never ever done — it is a perpetual exercise in futility and all in the name of air pollution control.

Clearly, this is not the way to go. The other problem is that there is no real link between the progress that cities have supposedly made to reduce PM10 with the action that they must have taken to get this done. 

In fact, there is often an inverse relationship — cities that rank high on reducing levels of pollution are at times the lowest in terms of action taken. This mismatch leads to policy confusion; it tells us nothing about what must be done to combat pollution and what is working and where. 

The much-heralded governmentalization of the air pollution agenda cannot become an exercise to move the files and tick the boxes. It must be about faction. This is about our air; the air we breathe and the clear air pollution is a great equaliser; the rich and the poor are impacted. 

This is not the case with water pollution, where the rich can move to cleaning the quality in-house or use bottled water. This is about air, which we will need to breathe and all the air purifiers in the world cannot help us. This is about our health and the health of our children.