Air pollution is yet to shake up policy initiatives despite its over-politicisation and has at best elicited pyrrhic measures

Two concurrent global surveys have only drummed into our ears what we have been reading on the wall for quite some time but have shut our other senses to. Unless our vision, too, has been clouded by a layer of brown grime and haze. One is a WHO report linking India’s toxic air pollution to the premature deaths of around 1,10,000 children deaths in 2016. And the other is the WWF Living Planet Index which indicates that global populations have, on an average, declined by 60 per cent in 40 years because of over-consumption of natural resources. In short, India needs to not just redefine sustainable living parameters but codify and enforce them on an emergency footing. Air pollution, despite the embarrassing media reports and the comparatives with other developing economies, has yet to shake up policy initiatives despite its over-politicisation and has at best elicited pyrrhic measures. In that sense, the latest WHO report is a bit more graphic as it concerns something that our development experts have been tomtomming, our demographic dividend. That’s severely compromised now as India has the highest number of air pollution related deaths in the 0-5 year age bracket, ahead of Nigeria, Pakistan and the Democratic Republic of Congo! Fatalities have been reported in more girls under the age of five than boys. These figures are from an assessment period when the air quality was hazardous and we are told the worst is yet to come. Also the child deaths have been almost certainly a result of high levels of the particulate matter 2.5, which have been the result of industrial, household pollution and agricultural waste burns. With 14 of the world’s 20 most polluted cities in India, we are undoubtedly carrying a burden for years. It is just that now the results are showing. A Delhi would-be mother has tried to promote awareness in her own way by wearing a mask and signing up for a campaign that focusses on the plight of pregnant women in highly polluted areas, considering that reduced oxygen intake severely impacts the foetus. New-borns are usually underweight, with low immunity and impaired development. Complicated respiratory diseases, asthma and cancer are decimating young lives than ever before. Even for those growing into adulthood, there is an ingrained vulnerability.

Of course, at the household level, there’s a gradual switchover to  clean cooking fuels and heating technologies, the Government’s Ujala scheme being an accelerator of the process. And while cleaner transport and energy-efficient systems get coopted in urban spaces, albeit in a patchy manner, it needs to percolate to the larger countryside on mission mode as part of community development. Cost-effective, recyclable technologies are needed on a mass scale to discourage waste burning, future planning needs to segregate child habitats like schools and playgrounds from polluting factory areas and industrial clusters. And though this may take a longer incubation time, power generation processes need to cut down emissions. It’s not that preventable measures, course correctives and alternative solutions are not known to us, it is just a question of recognising these as key development goals and not treat them as mere social objectives.