Copyright: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License © Author(s), Development Management FoundationCitation: Pandey, A. (2021). Case-let. Air Pollution: Delhi’s emerging challenges. ISDM Case Centre. Indian School of Development Management. Noida.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.58178/2110.1038
*The production of this case-let has been done using secondary data from multiple sources available in the public domain between 2020 and 2021. For updated resources, learners are recommended to supplement the case-let with secondary research. The case-let is part of a series of case studies to support learning pedagogies in Development Management. The production of this case has been financially supported by the Centre for Social Impact and Philanthropy (CSIP) and Ashoka University.
This case-let presents a brief analytical report on air pollution in India, focussing on the implications for Delhi and its citizenry. It engages with causal linkages between multiple phenomena in the context and captures some regional responses that have attempted to address the problem in other parts of Asia. The case-let illustrates how domain experts interpret the problem at hand, and the nature of experiences of citizens who were interviewed by various news agencies reporting on the subject between 2018 and 2019. The case-let offers insights into the nature of the relationship between different variables that define the context within which the problem of air pollution is located. It presents an opportunity for learners to engage in a system-mapping exercise, using tools of inquiry and analysis introduced as part of the course on Systems Thinking and Intervention Design.
Asia is home to 99 of the 100 most polluted cities globally, and in 2019, 21 out of the world’s 30 most polluted cities were in India (IQAirVisual, 2019). Air pollution has been rising at alarming rates in South Asia and South-East Asia, with toxic haze blanketing large parts of India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Jakarta, Hanoi, Malaysia and Singapore every year. India witnessed widespread improvement in PM2.5 levels in 2019, as compared to 2018. The reason for this improvement was attributed to a host of factors including meteorological conditions, economic slowdown, dedicated efforts of civil society organisations (CSOs) and the government. Despite these efforts, none of the Indian cities—including the National Capital Region of Delhi—met the World Health Organization (WHO)’s target of reducing the annual pollution exposure (placed at 10 μg/m3) in 2019 (IQAirVisual, 2019).
WHO estimates state that over seven million people die each year globally from both ambient (outdoor) and household (indoor) air pollution: India alone accounts for around 1.1 million deaths per year (WHO, 2016). In past years, a notable surge in the number of patients suffering from stroke, cardiac ailments, cardiac arrests, lung cancer and severe allergic bronchitis has been recorded during and after periods of peak pollution. Ninety per cent of these deaths are of people from lower-income groups. Global life expectancy has been shortened by 11 months because of air pollution. A significant contribution to this decrease in life expectancy is from some of the most polluted places in the world, including India. The brown haze that envelops New Delhi and adjoining areas in India every year during winters is severe and thousands of times more hazardous than the air quality index of countries like Canada. This exposes millions of people to health vulnerabilities at a catastrophic scale.
New Delhi is choking every day. The state government is widely accused of failing to curb pollution in the city. Matters turned particularly critical in the winter of 2019 with schools being shut, flights diverted and a declaration of a public health emergency. Doctors reported a five-time increase in the usual number of patients in the winter of 2019 due to the toxic smog that hung over New Delhi and its satellite areas. Multiple dailies compared Delhi’s air quality to a gas chamber, evoking gruesome images of suffering and increasing risk of health hazards for its citizens.
The reasons for such a situation in India’s capital have been attributed to a host of issues ranging from vehicular pollution and construction debris to stubble burning and household emissions. Experts such as Mr. Karthik Ganeshan, Research Fellow, Council on Energy, Environment and Water (Al Jazeera, 2018) point to multiple sources of emissions and cite lack of awareness amongst the common public to safeguard their health and demand citizen rights to clean air.
Stubble burning by farmers from the neighbouring states of Haryana and Punjab has occupied key debates in the mainstream media when it comes to dialogue on Delhi’s air pollution. After harvesting rice, farmers in nearby states need to clear their land for the winter wheat crop. The short window of time between the harvest period and the sowing, and lack of incentives for farmers to incur added costs to remove stubble from the field using clean technology have compelled them to use stubble burning as a means to clear their land. In South-East Asia, fires to clear and ready farmlands is a major problem that often leads to trans-country haze in countries across the region.
Governments of South-East Asian countries have recognised the economic and health impacts of such fires in the region and have tried to address the issue through a three-step process.
The government of Indonesia, for example, has identified critical areas of burning in specific land-use categories and soil content types. For example: peatland areas have been identified as critical regions that should urgently limit farm fires. The government has banned further development in peatland areas. It has created ways of working with farmers (small-holders and large companies) to introduce zero-burning best practices in farm management through financial incentives and technical support. In Punjab and Haryana in India, a large part of the problem emanates from the historical context of the Green Revolution brought to the region in the latter part of the 1960s (see Exhibit 1). Farmers’ collectives and CSOs in the region have been pushing for government intervention to facilitate a shift to other crops and investments in cleaner technologies towards enhancing the market value of the crop stubble as raw material in energy production. However, the lack of convergence between existing technologies available with farmers and piecemeal solutions offered by the government has created a solution gap that fails to recognise the contextualised adaptations of such interventions.
Rapid economic growth without environmental regulations emerges as another key contributing factor to the current pollution crisis. Delhi is surrounded by industrial units and power plants. An exponential increase in oil and coal consumption in India in the past decade is an undisputed reason behind the challenges faced in addressing this problem. While India has made progress in adopting clean technologies in some sectors, this gets offset by the 5%-10% increase in the consumption of “dirty” energy every year (Narain and Krupnick, 2007).
In the last few years, China has successfully brought down pollution by putting a stop to the increasing coal consumption and dramatic improvements in pollution control technologies in coal-fired power plants and factories. While measures taken in capital cities like New Delhi or Beijing catch national attention, one must realise that the problem of air pollution is highly dependent on the nature of pollutants entering the ecosystem from adjoining areas of the city. China could address the air pollution problem because it implemented regulations for power firms and industrial centres located in Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei spanning over 1.4 million square kilometres and affecting a population of over 800 million (World Bank, 2016).
The challenge for the Government of India has been the delay in recognising the severity of the issue and implementing necessary compliances for power plants and industrial units located in the vicinity of urban centres like Delhi, Lucknow and Mumbai. The power plants in these areas continue to flout the new emissions standards without any action being taken against them by the government. This disregard results in further dilution of standards themselves (Chattopadhyay, 2016).
Hence, when it comes to addressing the issue of pollution due to lack of regulation or dilution of emissions standards in the surrounding areas, the challenge is not limited to the boundaries of a particular city or state. A threat like air pollution requires regional action by the government based on scientific understanding of various key areas. These include urban planning, regulation of emission standards and the study of wind patterns that have the potential to carry the pollutants over certain distances or stagnate over certain regions due to the combined effect of unregulated emissions and annual weather patterns. For example, the pollution haze during winters in northern India extends from Punjab to West Bengal, exposing the population of the entire region to health hazards associated with the inhalation of toxic air.
Thus, the extent of damage caused by air pollution is not just determined by the prevalence of poverty in a country but also by its geographical location and the nature of the bio-ecosystem. For example: if a city or a state is located downstream (in the pattern of prevailing winds) from the fire and industrial emissions prone areas, it will directly impact the quality of air at various points in time over the year. Furthermore, household emissions and vehicular emissions add greatly to the challenge. Delhi alone has 10.98 million vehicles registered with the city authorities. Every year, the city witnesses close to a 5% jump in the number of vehicles plying on the roads (Chattopadhyay, 2016). In such a scenario, it is impossible for the government to regulate and ensure high vehicular emission standards. Hence, the response of the government in cities like Delhi is often limited to reducing the overall number of vehicles plying on the roads. The Delhi government’s “odd-even” scheme is one such example where the government mandates car rationing to address the problem of vehicular emissions during peak pollution seasons. The scheme entails that cars with odd and even registration plates are to be driven on different days. Other countries like Mexico and China have also used similar interventions in the past to address the problem.
Delhi was also one of the first cities in the country to espouse Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) for public vehicles in the 1990s, as a result of a change in regulations. This shift to CNG-run public vehicles was unprecedented even by European standards, given the sheer number of vehicles that shifted to the alternate fuel. Household emissions, on the other hand, are a more complex and deep-rooted issue for the country. WHO estimates that over 3 billion people (40% of the world’s population) still do not have access to clean cooking fuels and technologies (WHO, 2016). In India, 30% of all ambient particulate matter pollution emitted is from households burning biomass (WHO, 2016).
The Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana is an attempt by the Government of India to incentivise households to shift to cleaner technologies for domestic use. The government offers free Liquified Petroleum Gas (LPG) connections to households that are Below Poverty Line (BPL) and applies subsidies to the prices per unit. While the government attempts to incentivise the poor and vulnerable communities to move away from the use of biomass in cooking, it is a long-term strategy. It will require years of behavioural changes before large sections of the population can give up the use of biomass for cooking, as it is a free resource for many. The scheme is not only likely to improve the overall air quality in the vicinity but also likely to improve the experience of women and children in these households. Many, however, are yet to realise the benefits of using LPG despite the comparatively higher cost against the longer-term damage caused to health from the use of biomass.
There is a need to understand and analyse the issue of air pollution in India with a systems perspective. The problem at hand is complex and dynamic. Discreet, sporadic solutions to immediate symptomatic events witnessed by different regions of the country are bound to fail in addressing the issue at hand in a sustainable manner. While there is a need for the government and the polity to engage holistically with the issue and identify broader contours of the contextual nature of the problem with the support of a multi-disciplinary technical support team, there is also a need to ensure accountability of elected representatives in their engagement with the issue. Citizen action and awareness is critical in this regard. While awareness and advocacy on the gravity of the issue will enable the citizens to take precautions and reduce the extent of the public health crisis, the issue also deserves to take centre stage along with active political debates on unemployment, provision for basic services and economic growth of the country.
The pollution crisis in New Delhi has long been plagued by the relentless abdication of responsibility between political parties. Blame is shifted between parties in power to justify inaction. However, governments in power do not waste time in seeking credit for improvements in pollution indicators even when they have been caused by meteorological factors. Multiple causes of air pollution also imply that the responsibility of tackling the issue does not rest with one agency but with multiple bodies. The issue of air pollution urgently requires a designated authority willing to engage and effectively deliver impact outcomes across stakeholders.
India is now equipped with access to modular technology with the potential to measure pollution levels and access data to track the impact of its interventions at various levels. Additionally, citizen action plans to address anticipated issues of air pollution during specific times of the year must enable the preparedness of the city, key stakeholders and the citizens to meet expected civic behaviours. Such plans may include limitations on open waste burning, plying of vehicles on the road only with emission certificates, norms on regulation and disposal of construction waste, and regulation of emissions from industries and power firms as per standards, with the possibility to shut down certain industries and construction activities during certain periods of the year.
Large-scale destruction of rich bioregions such as the Aravallis compounds the problem. Measures to enhance the capacity of bioregions that absorb and nullify the impact of emissions should be taken up on priority. Planned regeneration and conservation of such bio-sinks will enable rapid addressal of the problem of air pollution through a multi-pronged strategy.
Such measures in urban areas must be supported with large-scale integrated agricultural development schemes across the country, giving real incentives to farmers for changing crop types or changing approaches that support mechanisation to reduce this annual large-scale burning of stubble. India needs to expand its horizon of solutions and take a broader innovative approach to include new incentives to address and prevent large-scale burning emissions and appropriate incentives for good land and agricultural management practices.
Table 1: Estimated premature mortality due to ambient air pollution in India
Source: Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, 2015
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