Odd-Even, Artificial Rains Make Fancy Headlines, But Can't Clean Our Air For Good

The WHO report hadn’t revealed anything terribly new. Even before that, several studies had pointed to the rapidly deteriorating air quality in Delhi. The polluted air was there for everyone to see. It was visibly unbreathable, and the reporting of respiratory diseases, particularly amongst children, had been showing a sharp rise.

It was only in the aftermath of the WHO report, however, that air pollution took centre-stage of the public discourse. That same year, in October, the central government unveiled a national air quality index, marking the first step towards monitoring, measuring and systematically combating air pollution. A decade on, the situation has barely improved. On the contrary, it has deteriorated further. Delhi’s air remains as dirty and unbreathable as ever, particularly during this time of the year that sees an annual outrage over bad air quality.

Worse, several other Indian cities, including relatively small towns in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, have emerged as new pollution hubs and begun to be counted amongst the world’s most polluted cities. They were, in all likelihood, already polluted long ago, but they came to be counted as a result of installation of modern measuring devices under the National Clean Air Programme, launched in 2019. The NCAP aims to improve air quality in all these towns and cities, and in many more.

Not An Intractable Problem

The lack of adequate progress in Delhi makes it appear that air pollution is an intractable problem. It is not. In fact, unlike climate change, it is not even a hard problem that imposes difficult trade-offs, often involving moral or ethical dilemmas.

Air pollution is an eminently solvable problem, as has been demonstrated by several other cities in the world, though quick fixes might not be available. The problem has been the lack of effort, and sometimes capabilities, to do the simple and obvious things.

In Delhi, the uproar on air pollution is usually triggered by the winter spikes, especially during the two or three weeks that agriculture waste burning in neighbouring states of Punjab and Haryana leads to a massive increase in the concentration of suspended particles in the air. Most of the mitigation efforts are also directed at dealing with this spike. But Delhi’s air remains dirty for the rest of the year as well.

The base-load of emissions -- from vehicles, road dust, construction activities, industrial sources -- itself is quite high, and little has been done to deal with this high base-load. While some measures, like those meant to contain vehicular or industrial emissions, are dependent on detailed studies and data, and require longer term commitment, it is the inability to do the most simple and obvious things, despite all the outrage, that has kept the base-load emissions so high.

Several studies have shown road dust to be one of the major sources of pollution in Delhi, contributing anywhere between 15 to 30 per cent of PM2.5 concentrations during different seasons. A large part of this could easily be eliminated if we just stick to best practices in road construction and dust management.

The quality of our roads, especially in the cities, leaves much to be desired. The edges of the road are often not properly finished, and these result in release of large particles of extremely harmful coal tar in the air as the vehicles move on them. There is no reason for keeping gaps between the edge of the road and pavements. These are dust bowls. Same is the case with road dividers when they can easily be grassed or covered. The PWD and landscaping department of the local municipal corporations can have a very big role to play in improving air quality.

Construction activities are another key contributor to air pollution in Delhi-NCR, especially in the satellite towns of Gurgaon, Noida, Faridabad and Ghaziabad. That is no surprise again. Much of our construction is carried out in a primitive manner. The sites are open, materials and waste are kept in the open, sometimes for years, and are transported in open trucks. No study, no data or technology is needed to deal with these.

In fact, construction is one activity whose contribution to particulate matter concentration can be brought to near-zero almost overnight by just ensuring that basic standard operating procedures are followed.

But instead of doing the relatively simple and straightforward things, authorities seem more enamoured with fancy ideas like odd-and-even and cloud seeding. It probably gives them a sense of feeling that they are seen to be doing something. The Delhi government is planning to introduce the odd-and-even scheme from next week and shower the city landscape with artificial rain in the following week.

A couple of weeks of odd-and-even scheme might bring down the AQI needle by a few points, but it does zilch to solving the pollution problem or its health impacts. Artificial rain through cloud seeding can be useful in some situations, like in ensuring timely sowing of crops when rains are delayed, but using it to improve air quality is like chasing a mirage.

Way Forward

Tackling air pollution is usually a three-stage process. The first involves setting up observation and measuring networks and collecting data. This gives information not just about how dirty the air is and at which locations, but also about what makes it dirty.

The second stage is about analysing the data, doing source apportionment studies to establish the origins of pollutants, and studying flow patterns to determine how the pollutants move during different times of the day and mark out air sheds. At least in India so far, air pollution has largely been treated as a city issue, something that needs to be tackled by municipal authorities. However, experts are increasingly emphasising on the air shed approach, which points out that pollutants have been traveling far away from their sources, affecting air quality all along the way.

The third stage involves the actual mitigation efforts -- devising action plans for graded reduction of emissions from each of the known sources. Most cities of India, barring Delhi, are currently in stage one. They are still setting up monitoring networks, though efforts are also being made, simultaneously, to make some nominal reductions in emissions, about 3 to 15 per cent from current levels, by doing the obvious things. In 2021-22, according to government data, only 45 of the 131 cities under this programme met these modest targets.

Real time monitoring of AQI data in nearly 240 cities of the country shows that less than 30 per cent of them were in the good or satisfactory category during the first three days of this week. Bad air quality is certainly not just a problem limited to the national capital region of Delhi-NCR. Neither is it a seasonal problem, though favourable weather conditions do help in dispersing the pollutants during some other months, keeping the air tolerable.

Some very welcome decisions taken in the last few years are expected to pay handsome dividends in improving air quality. These include the leapfrogging to Bharat VI vehicle emission norms from Bharat IV, defining and implementing emission standards for highly polluting industries, policy incentives for faster adoption of electric vehicles and improving public transportation networks.

These would deliver long term benefits and aim at reducing the base-load. What is needed is similarly robust response in the short term as well, since air pollution is really becoming a survival issue in certain cases. There is a lot that can be done to curtail the base-load in a very short term, by taking simple, straightforward and cost-effective measures.

(Amitabh Sinha is Deputy Editor with The Indian Express. Views expressed are personal)