Smog is crippling the next generation

It was a relief to escape from suffocating Delhi where law and order seemed also to have collapsed and return to Kolkata last week. But toxic though the capital’s air was, I won’t pretend it was altogether new. Three other cities I have lived in -- Manchester, Newcastle upon Tyne and even Singapore -- have been shrouded in a haze on occasion but with a vital difference. Their leaders were not gallivanting abroad or merely watching the disgraceful fisticuffs between lawyers and policemen while people choked and coughed. Nor did they insult public agony with claptrap about digitalisation and "faceless tax assessment".

As a newspaper reporter in Newcastle, I was in the town hall council chamber when the Lord Mayor, a working class housewife in everyday life, summoned the directors of some of Britain’s biggest industrial companies after a smog-shrouded day and gave them a sharp dressing-down. My Lord Mayor brusquely silenced a director who tried to talk smoothly of how their gratifying profits reflected credit on the city. Profits might be gratifying for businessmen, she retorted bluntly, but public health was her concern. She would shut down their factories if pollution continued.

I first heard the word smog as a teenager in Manchester in the 1950s when visibility could dwindle to a foot, and your handkerchief was black with grit when you blew your nose. John Ruskin, the social thinker, called smog “Manchester Devil’s darkness” and said the city was the spiritual home of pollution. Old-timers recalled a thick cloud smothering Manchester in 1931, killing 450 people. Not even the smokeless zone that the National Smoke Abatement Society’s campaign created could avoid deaths from lung diseases such as bronchitis. Manchester had the “foulest air in Britain” in 1995. No wonder Victorians branded it the “Chimney of the World”.

What Singapore called the haze was not very different from Delhi’s pollution: satellite imagery confirmed it was mainly smoke from fires all over Indonesia, especially in Sumatra and Borneo. Singapore, Brunei, Malaysia and southern Thailand were worst affected, the soaring air pollution index sometimes forcing shops, offices and places of entertainment to close down, especially during June and July. 

Pressured by its ASEAN neighbours, Indonesia’s government eventually began to use weather-changing technology to create artificial rain and extinguish raging fires. Thousands of soldiers, marines and airmen were deployed to fight the flames while military aircraft and helicopters carried out water bombing and cloud-seeding. These expensive and elaborate methods were necessary only because Indonesia’s rulers were as callous and corrupt as India’s. The fires were not natural phenomena as in California or Australia but the result of slash-and-burn operations to clear forest land for commercial plantations. 

Some of Indonesia’s most influential tycoons were suspected of involvement. Everyone knew who they were, but – as in India -- the rich and the powerful were above the law. Among them in my time were prominent golfing partners of Suharto who was president for 31 years, from Sukarno’s ouster in 1967 until the 1998 uprising forced his resignation. Later, various agriculture and forestry ministers daringly promised to publish the names of the guilty firms and expedite their prosecution but I don’t know if the threats were ever carried out.

Delhi’s infinitely worse plight is similar in the sense that despite the furore over odd and even numbers, the problem is really agricultural. Anyone who ventures into the surrounding countryside, whether Haryana, Punjab or Uttar Pradesh, at once sees smoke billowing from fields whose paddy stubble must be burned hastily to sow the wheat crop. Special incentives for encouraging water exploitation for extra production are now counter-productive. Instead of squandering money on boosting crops, the government should eliminate excess production (which is criminally wasted anyway) and invest in modern equipment that is beyond the financial resources of cultivators to clear fields and convert stubble to manure or fodder or some other useful product, thus sparing the neighbourhood poisonous pollution. Gimmicks like Swachh Bharat are unworthy of a responsible government. 

Toxic air is India’s fifth largest killer, taking toll of about 1.5 million lives annually. The World Health Organisation reckons India has the world's highest death rate from chronic respiratory diseases and asthma. Delhi’s intense pollution irreversibly damages the lungs and stunts the brain development of 2.2 million (50 per cent) children. Smog is crippling the next generation. India’s future is imperilled. Any government that tolerates that commits a crime against humanity. The Supreme Court has reminded us that such a government is unfit to govern.