Sound and fury

Health ministry's lopsided focus on noisy firecrackers

Dr Harsh Vardhan’s call for a silent Diwali could be seen as a well-publicised expression of civic concern from a prominent citizen. As such, it is welcome. But Dr Vardhan is also the health and family welfare minister in the Union government. And as such, he could do much better — by putting an equal if not greater onus on his colleague Prakash Javadekar, minister of state for environment and forests, to make Diwali celebrations environmentally safe across the country. After all, it is the Union environment ministry and its agencies’ duty to regulate environmental pollution from any product, including Diwali firecrackers.

There are four steps to regulating environmental pollution. One requires setting benchmarks for an acceptable level of pollution of both kinds — in this case, both noise pollution and the chemical load in the ambient atmosphere. The next step is to work backwards from those benchmarks, project the volume of sale of the polluting products and to impose standards that manufacturers or importers of firecrackers must meet. The third step is to ensure compliance with these product standards. And fourth, it is necessary to find ways to induce less use of polluting products. Focusing on noise pollution at Diwali will be seen as tokenism when these four important steps have been largely ignored by the Indian government when it comes to urban air pollution in general. True, the government has some norms for ambient air quality. But it has a very poor mechanism to monitor these norms. And worse still, it has a dismal record in regulating pollution at the point of origin, such as industry or automobiles or construction sites. The government’s ability to set proper standards for these sources of pollution is also highly compromised.

The Union health minister’s call for a silent Diwali and imposition of the Supreme Court-ordained ban on noise-making crackers in residential areas is problematic because it puts the onus on citizens to be more responsible, instead of on government to be more efficient. As with the Swachch Bharat campaign, proper citizen behaviour will be induced once overall municipal standards are adhered to. Worse still, the health minister’s suggestion aims in, actually, the wrong direction. A silent cracker does not really mean an environmentally safe cracker. It is the silent firecrackers that can release more harmful chemicals in the atmosphere, such as sulphur dioxide, magnesium and carbon monoxide. The noxious cocktail of these chemicals hangs in the atmosphere leading to respiratory problems in the chill of Diwali night and after. Excessive use of dirty and unregulated firecrackers is to blame not just for noise pollution but as much for ambient air pollution.

Creating a public campaign around reducing the use of firecrackers has worked partially in the past in metropolitan cities such as Delhi. The campaigns have worked primarily through the sensitisation of school-going children. But there is a limit to what can be achieved purely through such citizen-focused campaigns, without the existence of regulations and their strict implementation. If Dr Vardhan is really concerned about public health, he needs to attack the menace from all fronts and convince the environment ministry under his colleague to get cracking on regulating air pollution as a public health emergency, Diwali or not. The government has the responsibility to take more than an equal step with its citizens to protect the environment and not send out public-relations focused letters that do not make complete sense.