An inevitable crisis

Delhi's pollution needs more than political point-scoring

This weekend, the National Green Tribunal (NGT) examined the planned odd-even car rationing scheme that the Aam Aadmi Party-led Delhi government wanted to introduce in order to address the city’s pollution emergency, and ordered constraints on its operation. The Tribunal directed the scheme to operate without exemptions, such as for women drivers and for two-wheelers and asked if it was being brought into force on a whim. The NGT also questioned the rationale for an increase in parking fees, which the Delhi government thought would control the number of cars used by commuters and thus the overall pollution level in the city. In response, the Delhi government cancelled the implementation of the odd-even plan. This acrimonious back-and-forth is just another episode in the increasingly dysfunctional attempt to address Delhi’s pollution crisis, which is saga in which no institution — whether courts, the Centre, or multiple state governments — has come out looking particularly good.

The question is whether Delhi’s bad air crisis, although a serious health hazard, can even accurately be called an “emergency” if the emergence of the problem can easily be predicted ahead of time. Every year, a combination of circumstances causes, at some time during the cooler weather, a shroud of smog and dense particulate matter to descend on Delhi. This is a practically inevitable consequence of existing policies. Efforts should, therefore, be focused on changing the policies that cause this yearly phenomenon. Why, precisely, would such efforts require the crisis to already have hit? Energy should be spent throughout the year on preparing to minimise the effect of the cooler weather. It is known, for example, that the burning of agricultural waste in the fields of Punjab and Haryana is a major contributor to the haze that descends over north India. Given that, why is it that the chief ministers of Delhi and Punjab are busy passing the buck on Twitter? Why is the Centre seemingly uninvolved in what clearly requires inter-state coordination — indeed, international coordination, since Pakistani Punjab is also a stakeholder in creating and solving the problem? Most importantly, why is this conversation taking place only once the crop burning is already underway, and the air quality has already declined?

It is a sad reflection on the problems of Indian governance that such a serious health and environmental hazard recurs every year, as regularly as clockwork, and there appears to be no institutional co-operation to solve it. This winter, as well, there will no doubt be policy experiments, drastic actions of unknown utility, buck-passing and political point-scoring — and, finally, the issue will be forgotten when the weather warms up in late February. None of the stakeholders appears to be willing to take up leadership; most effort seems to go into tearing down others’ proposed solutions and attempting to shift responsibility. Hopefully, the voters of north India will soon make it clear to their leaders that this state of affairs cannot be allowed to continue. North India’s air kills people every winter; it must be treated as a year-long, constant policy problem and not just a political debate for a few months in the year.