Pollution crisis

Delhi needs local solutions

After hovering between “poor” and “very poor” categories for nearly a month, the air quality in Delhi and its adjoining states in the National Capital Region (NCR) has deteriorated to the “severe” class, prompting the Commission for Air Quality Management to invoke emergency pollution-control measures under stage-III of the Graded Response Action Plan (GRAP). These steps include ban on construction and demolition, closure of brick kilns and hot mix plants, and restriction on plying BS-III petrol and BS-IV diesel vehicles. The bouts of choking pollution and consequential disruptive curbs, which recur so often in this region, are not only deleterious for the economy but also injurious to human health. Thousands of workers, especially daily wagers, lose their livelihood. The long-term exposure to toxic pollutants, on the other hand, poses the risk of respiratory disorders and, in some cases, even more serious pulmonary diseases, strokes and cancer. What is worse, the air quality monitoring agencies reckon the grave pollution phase to last for a while despite the meteorologists predicting some increase in the wind speed that can improve ventilation to disperse pollutants.

This dismal state of affairs, notably, cannot be attributed to the convenient scapegoat — crop fires — which occur only for a short period between mid-October and mid-November. The pollution tends to persist almost throughout the year. Also, most of the pollutants seem to be locally generated, although some meteorological features, such as humidity, wind speed and its direction, do play a role in the consolidation or dispersal of the toxicants. In fact, the weather bureau, taking these factors into account, had issued an advance warning this time about the likely worsening of air quality, but this was not taken seriously enough to promulgate the phase-III of GRAP norms well in time to stave off the current pollution crisis.

The notion that local causes are majorly responsible for the national capital’s unrelenting pollution is not a mere hypothesis. It is actually based on, and validated by, the findings of scientific studies conducted by reputed institutions. A study carried out by the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur at the behest of the Delhi Pollution Control Committee in 2016 had identified top contributors to the air’s particulate matter (PM2.5 and PM10) as road dust (56 per cent), concrete batching (10 per cent), industrial discharges (10 per cent) and vehicular emissions (9 per cent). The smoke from burning of garbage and bonfires by people to warm themselves in winters further aggravates the situation. These findings have, more or less, been corroborated by a study conducted by the Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment in the third week of October this year. It reckoned the contribution of vehicular emissions to the PM2.5 content of the air at 51 per cent. The share of the residential sector was estimated at 13 per cent and that of industries at 11 per cent.

It is, thus, clear that pollution is largely a localised issue that needs situation-specific solutions. The remedy for Delhi, therefore, lies in replacing manual sweeping of roads with mechanical vacuum cleaning, stopping torching of dry leaves and garbage, switching over to cleaner domestic cooking fuel and, most importantly, reducing vehicular pollution by encouraging the use of CNG or electric vehicles. Action on these fronts can deliver better and enduring dividends.