Solutions to pollution need political will

Jupiter has its Great Red Spot — an unending storm that rages across the giant planet.  India has its Great Brown Spot — a massive smudge of pollution that vitiates the quality of life for months every winter.  

The Great Brown Spot showed up on satellite pictures about five years ago.  Since then, it’s become a permanent feature of the Northern winter.  Words like Vogmask and acronyms like AQI have entered the Hinglish lexicon. Schemes like odd-even have been implemented.  Schools are now braced for regular shutdowns every winter.  Air purifier sales have boomed.  The morning walk or indeed, any walk outdoors, has become an act of reckless courage.  

Things haven’t gotten any better through all this time despite the fact that this affects the health of every resident of North India’s plains. That should make dealing with it a political imperative since it cuts across all ideologies and income classes. Indeed, any party that offered credible solutions to pollution should stand to gain substantially in vote share across several states.

Why hasn’t this happened? The scale is large but there is also lack of political will. Ideally, the administrations of four states and the Centre should be setting up a joint task force and inducting experts to tackle the problem.  Instead we see a blame game where each state points fingers at the others. Obviously, the solutions would be complicated, and equally obviously, there can be no solution until there's a political consensus that there’s something to be gained by seeking solutions.

How long does it take before an obvious problem becomes an issue that politicians of every hue are prepared to grapple with?  Also, how long does it take before political consensus translates into effective action? These are interesting questions and worth pondering in some detail.  

Looking back, Indira Gandhi started the Garibi Hatao campaign in the early 1970s and followed through with the more pointed trifecta of Roti, Kapda, Makaan in the mid 1970s. Poverty and hunger have been integral to the subcontinental civilisational experience for millennia. There were localised famines in the 1960s before the Green Revolution. Indeed, the US’ diplomatic leverage over India then was largely due to the PL-480 Program, which donated wheat to a nation that lived on the edge of starvation.

Indira Gandhi may just have been paying lip service to poverty alleviation and tackling hunger when she started mouthing those slogans. But it did lead to political consensus. Every political formation that has come to power since 1977 has subscribed to that consensus. Along the way, hunger has been largely alleviated. Poverty reduction is a more controversial subject —policy in this regard hasn’t been optimal but every government in the last 40 years has made attempts at poverty reduction.

The next major consensus, at least in terms of political slogans, was Bijli, Sadak, Paani.  The focus on basic infrastructure gained consensus during the Atal Bihari Vajpayee regime and again, it has been followed through by every political formation that has held power at state or Centre in the last 20 years.

Successes are qualified. There have been multiple financial defaults and unfinished road projects; the power sector is a financial horror-show due to loss-making state electricity boards; water resource management is abysmal. But that is due to the generic incompetence of India’s policy-makers, not the lack of political will.

It is also undeniable that, despite defaults and abandoned projects, India has a better road network now. The power grid has a larger footprint and it’s more reliable, though that’s not saying much, given how poor electric supply used to be.

The key factor here is that these are now matters of consensus: Citizens will demand that any government provides basic infrastructure regardless of its ideological stances. Pollution alleviation probably has to hit the same levels of consensus before the Great Brown Spot reduces in size. That might take a couple of decades going by the experiences cited above.