[sustran] DEATH IN THE AIR -- air pollution

[Vinay Baindur]

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1131022/jsp/opinion/story_17476754.jsp#.UmaMfnCmh_A


DEATH IN THE AIR

That a society and polity obsessed with spiritual and moral pollution
should be so criminally indifferent to the mortal dangers of air pollution
is a paradox that the Indian State and citizenry seem to have immured
themselves to.


Think of what might have happened if half the zeal with which the State
purifies films and television programmes had been channelled into purifying
urban air and rural water. Significantly fewer Indians would have died of
cancer and other illnesses. Could it be that the luridly visual emphasis on
the perils of cigarette-smoking in the public media, so ardently invested
in by the government, is partly to deflect attention — and responsibility —
from the fact that more than a fourth of the patients being treated for
lung disorders are non-smokers? The World Health Organization has recently
classified outdoor air pollution as carcinogenic, and India emerges as the
country with the worst air quality among the 132 countries assessed earlier
this year.


Within such a scenario, Delhi’s slight upper-hand over Calcutta in lowering
vehicular pollution levels becomes somewhat insignificant. Indifference to
air pollution turns out to be a national, rather than local, problem. It is
a form of corruption, the culpability of which has not yet been fathomed,
and addressed, by civil society in India.

Yet, this culpability cannot be embodied solely by the State. Indian
citizens are far from being merely the ‘victims’ of administrative
negligence, for rising levels of air pollution are not just a political,
but also a civic, and civil, issue. Every time a car-owner colludes with
the system to bribe his way out of a pollution test, or every time a family
buys polluting fire-crackers for Diwali, culpability is shared actively by
citizens and their administrators. How many homes, schools, colleges and
universities encourage young people to use bicycles to move about within
the city?


So, when the civic authorities in Calcutta were about to ban bicycles from
its roads instead of promoting and making special room for them, the
outrageousness of that move was protested against by only a few. This kind
of wrong-headedness and apathy is as culpable as, say, India’s stance of
third-world defensiveness in the international fora for environmental
legislation and policy-making, absolving itself from responsibility for
global warming simply because it happens to be one of the ‘poorer’ nations.