Why we're feeling choked and breathless

From the first breath you take as a child, you inhale harmful gases and toxic particles. That's how bad the situation is in India.

It is not wrong therefore to say that we live in smoke-filled gas chambers, feeling choked and breathless, gasping for some ounce of fresh, clean air.

Pollution levels are at their worst. While there are talks all around on what needs to be done, there are no concrete measures to be seen. Can we learn from other countries, like China and the developed Western world, who have battled this problem?

Pallavi Aiyar, journalist and author, in her new book Choked offers help in form of suggestions and measures. She talks about what can be done and how.

22 out of 50 most polluted cities globally, are in India. What's the root cause and what needs to be done?

There is nothing puzzling about the badly polluted air in India; it is a large, populous, industrialising and developing country. Toxic air is only a side effect of industrialisation; the collateral damage of development. And it has been like this for what are now the rich, clean, countries of the Western world as much as in countries closer to home, like China.

Pollution is a multi-faceted phenomenon that results from a combination of vehicular, industrial and household sources. The burning of fuels like coal, for instance, leads to noxious gases like sulphur dioxide whereas diesel engines spout nitrogen oxides.

Construction dust, on the other hand, contributes to coarse particulate matter.

All of these sources collectively are responsible for finer particulate matter, called PM 2.5.

Burning of trash and leaves during winter, a common practice in northern cities, adds to toxicity as does agricultural burning. We need to devise a plan that addresses multiple sources of air pollution simultaneously rather than single-mindedly focussing on one source.

It's also crucial to coordinate plans across stare boundaries because the wind does not recognise borders.

According to reports, one of every four children in Delhi suffers from a serious lung disorder, and hundreds of thousands of premature deaths in India are due to toxic air? What wrong have we done as a country to have such dismal figures?

Like other countries at similar points in their industrialisation, we have allowed air pollution to become banal.

Instead of viewing it as a public health emergency, we tend to see dirty, toxic air as non-modifiable fact of life, an inconvenience at worse.

Every Diwali, for instance, when a combination of different factors including agricultural burning in neighbouring states and firecrackers create a heavy blanket of smog in Delhi, people are concerned only for a brief period.

After a few weeks, dirty air goes back to being uncommented upon and unnoticed. As a country, we need to wake up both at individual and governmental levels if we want to clean our environment.

It is not tough and impossible. But it requires citizen awareness, civil society activism, political will and bureaucratic incentives.

China has developed a network of 1,500 air quality monitoring stations in over 900 cities apart from restrictions on industries and vehicles. Can India learn anything from China?

For India, China is the contemporary example to learn from.

My book Choked argues that although Beijing may still be a poster child for what not to do on the issue of pollution in the international imagination, China has actually undertaken far-reaching and difficult measures to ensure that the worst is over.

China’s coal use is down and coal-fired power plants are increasingly efficient. The country has emerged as a leading producer of pollution-abatement equipment. Also, the share of thermal power plants with basic pollution abatement equipment in China is 95 per cent compared to 10 per cent in India.

What we as individuals can and need to do in order to make our surroundings less polluted, and the air we breathe less toxic?

We as individuals are also responsible for the air we breathe and waiting for the government to implement policy changes while we continue to pollute the air is a recipe for failure.

Changing our behaviour, will mean trade-offs between short-term inconveniences and long-term environmental and health gains.

These include car pooling, composting leaves, sorting out waste at a neighbourhood level, and abstaining from polluting actions like bursting firecrackers.

Do you agree that pollution from adjoining states of Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand needs to be tackled simultaneously?

Imposing measures to control air pollution in Delhi is pointless unless similar measures are also imposed on the cities, small towns and fields of Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh. Even the most drastic policies, if centered on Delhi alone, will be ineffective.

Pollution, which has its source in crop burning or power plants located in neighbouring areas ends up in Delhi. The whole of northern India is dangerously polluted.

In the latest WHO list, four of the world’s ten most polluted cities, in terms of annual average PM 2.5 levels, are Indian. They include Gwalior, Allahabad, Patna and Raipur (Delhi did not feature in the top 10).

One big problem is lack of pollution monitoring capacity across swathes of the country.

Delhi has most resources and gets the most attention. But, air pollution is certainly not a Delhi-specific hazard.

(Choked by Pallavi Aiyar is exclusively available on the Juggernaut app.)

Also read: A look at iconic paintings in the time of Delhi pollution

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