Our magical thinking on pollution: Do annual rituals, hope you are immune

Why in the News

India’s response to air pollution has settled into annual rituals, visible seasonal steps that leave pollution’s sources untouched. Their cost falls first on the poor, and divided State authority and weak incentives block lasting measures beyond Delhi.

Why has fighting pollution become a ritual?

1. What it is: The Air Quality Index (AQI) turns pollutant levels into one daily number showing how unhealthy the air is. Daily tracking was meant to build public pressure for cleaner air.
2. Monitoring without action: Delhi residents check the AQI daily, but checking has not cleaned the air. It resembles King Mithridates dosing himself with poison, hoping for immunity.
3. Visible but weak tools: Action has shrunk to showy steps: mist cannons, anti-smog guns, tattered green nets on building sites, a few road vacuums, and tree planting as forest cover shrinks.
4. Blaming seasonal sources: The state targets short, visible events such as stubble burning and firecrackers, and leaves poor waste management unfixed. Critics call such bans a cultural attack, not a health measure.
5. The takeaway: Monitoring and seasonal bans have replaced the harder work of cutting pollution at its sources across India.

Who pays for anti-pollution measures?

1. Construction ban: The Commission for Air Quality Management (CAQM), the National Capital Region (NCR) air regulator, halted construction for 15 days. 70% of daily-wage labourers in Gurugram and Manesar got no relief.
2. Small fires and dirty fuels: Bans on small fires and “dirty energy” hit the poor, small businesses and eateries first.
3. “Laptop class”: During COVID-19, the US National Institutes of Health director used this term for office workers whom lockdowns shielded at manual workers’ cost. Pollution work-from-home rules repeat this.
4. Weak public support: The poor experience environmental rules as policing of the poor, so public demand for such rules stays weak.

What has the state done, and what holds it back?

1. Measures in place: The government backs clean energy and electric vehicles (EVs), and has moved many industries to cleaner fuels. Its National Clean Air Programme (NCAP) covers over a hundred cities.
2. State capacity: It is unclear whether these schemes match the problem’s scale, or whether the state will build capacity to run them.
3. Federalism: Polluted air crosses State borders, but each State governs only its own territory, so each pushes the cost onto a neighbour or shifts the blame.
4. No demand outside Delhi: Most States face no political pressure for clean air, and even Delhi does not clearly prioritise it.

Why has the PARIVARTAN scheme fallen short?

1. What it offers: PARIVARTAN subsidises replacing commercial vehicles with Bharat Stage VI (BS-VI) vehicles, the strictest Indian emission standard, or with EVs.
2. NCR only: The scheme is confined to the NCR, where the crisis is most acute. India still lacks a national strategy for cleaner transport.
3. Low uptake: Only 56,000 vehicles have registered and a few hundred operators have claimed the subsidy, which is too small to make switching worthwhile.
4. Production first: The government made subsidies work in its Production Linked Incentive (PLI) schemes, which reward firms for raising output. It has not done the same for environmental goals.

Challenges

1. Airshed mismatch: Outside the NCR, no authority can act on pollution that crosses State borders.
2. Unequal burden: Curbs without income relief turn workers and small traders against environmental rules.
3. Underpriced pollution: Polluters do not pay for the health damage they cause, so cleaner fuels and vehicles stay costlier.

Way Forward

1. Polluter pays: Charge polluters for the health and environmental damage they cause, so cleaner choices become cheaper.
2. National clean transport strategy: Redesign transport beyond the NCR before other regions reach Delhi’s pollution levels, instead of shifting Delhi’s old vehicles there.
3. Relief during bans: Pair construction bans with wage support for daily-wage labourers.

Conclusion

India’s clean air programmes are real but undersized, and its yearly response still leans on rituals that burden the poor. The test is whether incentives and authority are scaled to whole airsheds, not to Delhi’s winter.

What is the Airshed Approach?

1. About: An airshed is an area where terrain and prevailing winds mix the air into one body, so emissions spread across it.
2. Boundary: Mountain ranges, wind direction and the depth of the mixing layer set the boundary, not administrative lines, much as water flow defines a watershed.
3. Rationale for regional management: An authority smaller than the airshed can be blamed for pollution it neither caused nor can reduce. The CAQM is India’s only regulator drawn on airshed lines.

Matching Previous Year Question

“[2021, GS3, 10 marks] Describe the key points of the revised Global Air Quality Guidelines (AQGs) recently released by the World Health Organisation (WHO). How are these different from its last update in 2005? What changes in India’s National Clean Air Programme are required to achieve these revised standards?”