World Health Organization data show that of the top 20 most polluted cities in the world - that is, those with the highest levels of PM2.5 (particles in air less than 2.5 micrometres in diametre) - fully half are in India. None of these cities seems overly worried about it. The only plausible reason for this nonchalance is that people are unable to conceive of dying from breathing, since indeed it is breathing that appears to keep them alive. Alive enough to drive to the doctor for their asthma, bronchitis, sinusitis, COPD, spasmodic cough, headache and carbon-monoxide poisoning.
Anyone foolish enough to travel to Delhi can expect instant respiratory irritation. Try living here. According to the Delhi government's website, suspended particulate matter can alter the immune system, and affect liver, kidney and brain functions. The air we breathe is lethal. It is shredding our health; yet because the process is slow and often imperceptible until it's dangerous, we don't kick up a fuss about pollution, or insist that politicians and administrators address the problem. In most party manifestos, right beside a loud honking concern for public health is a large environment- and pollution-shaped silence. It doesn't compute.
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Has it just never occurred to India's electorate to make pollution an election issue? Is that because we imagine quality of life in terms of material consumption rather than in terms of wellbeing? Surely, nothing says "do something" like a baby on a nebulizer. But the same people who would never dream of drinking straight from the tap rarely think about the air they breathe. Perhaps that's because the answer to polluted tap water is filtration and bottled water, which is like popping a pill; but polluted air requires the equivalent of a lifestyle change, so most people prefer to just not acknowledge the problem. Whatever it is, it manifests as an extraordinary disinterest in our own poisoning.
You sort of have to be willing to make the connection between bad air (and water), bad health and poor quality of life. In 1952, London went through what is now called the Great Smog, or Big Smoke - in which still air over the city mingled with chimney smoke, smoke from coal-based power stations, vehicle exhaust and sundry other pollutants to create a five-day shroud of unprecedented pollution. Nobody made a fuss, at the time, because Londoners were used to fog. But this event caused the premature death of an estimated 4,000 people (though the figure may have been much higher) and ill health to an estimated 10,000 (some say closer to 25,000). In response to this data, London passed the Clean Air Act of 1956. The act covered smoke, not sulphur dioxide, and it didn't prevent a similar pollution crisis for a few days in 1962, but at least it tried.
Then you have to be willing to demand action.
Today, London breathes in 16 µg/m3, and Delhi, 153 µg/m3.
It seems a shame that we only seem capable of evaluating costs in financial terms. It was not until cleaning up was shown to be massively cheaper than paying healthcare costs that Britain really began to address pollution. We in India desperately need the same focus, not just in Delhi but in all the metros and, preventatively, in places that don't yet suffer the choking grit of urbania. If sheer love of health isn't doing the trick, perhaps figures that show the difference between pollution standard enforcement costs and healthcare costs will.
India has a perfectly well-intentioned set of laws on water and air pollution, and Delhi did a sterling job around the turn of the century to control vehicle pollution, but you don't need any more data than your nose and lungs to tell you that the addition of half a million vehicles on the roads each year in Delhi, coupled with dust, construction debris and industrial pollution, means that unless we do something more, something longer-term, we will at best be running to stand still.
The bottom line is quite simple. Do you like breathing? Make it an election issue.