I am an Asthmatic. The guys in the photo are not. They are healthy, young and resilient. I am 73 and frail. I came back from Goa to Delhi by air on November 5. Two days later I was eating corticosteroids instead of squid, Pan D instead of vindaloo, antibiotics instead of fish thalis, ingesting expectorants instead of kokum, vitamins instead of dab (narial ), medicines to enhance the absorption of other medicines, instead of exercise and miserable at becoming, from a beach combing type albeit with a frozen shoulder, to a 93 years (looking) invalid, dependent on doctors (very dependable luckily – Dr Devi Durga Das ENT – you can’t get better in Delhi)- machines, chemists (very obliging and prompt), tubes and the good will of my long suffering family, including our pet, Sheru for survival.
I relived fear and paranoia of the bad old Covid pandemic days.
Why do we do this to ourselves year in and year out? Explanation are a dime a dozen.
Farmers are an unruly lot and couldn’t be bothered to cut the rice straw and transport it to incinerators or furnaces with pollution control filters on emission vents.
Real estate developers are untamable and do not manage particulate emissions from their projects.
Private vehicles are the smog kings of the road. With less than 5 percent of the Delhi National Capital Region vehicles being electric – taking private vehicles off road is a yudh (war) that even Maharana Pratap would shrink from. Deprive a Delhi wallah/wallhi of their vehicle and its akin to separating Maharana Pratap from his steed –Chetak– not to be mistaken with the spunky little scooter Bajaj motors marketed in 1972 by the same name and laughed their way to multi-year profits.
Let’s just look at these three sources of dust and particulate pollution and whether anything can be done to curb their emissions.
70 percent of vehicles in Delhi are 2 wheelers. Supplanting petrol guzzling “Chetaks” is the easiest. It’s 2019 model is electric, and Bajaj is still laughing. Others are following. Asthmatics just have to live for another ten years to see the results. (Ha Ha)
About 9 percent of two wheelers in Delhi are already electric. The good news is that they are growing at 45% per year. So, by 3030 the entire fleet could be electric – IF domestic charging arrangements are promoted, IF public chargers proliferate and IF electricity supply does not collapse under the existing “free electricity” and “subsidized” electricity policy.
Is there any reason why cash transfers to the bottom 50 percent of Delhi by income levels, cannot substitute for ending both “free” and “subsidized” electricity- the benefits of which don’t reach the really poor or the migrants- and are creamed off by landlords. Let’s walk the talk. Insulate the transition to paid electricity and paid public transport for the poor, with a cash transfer, unburdening utility finances from this drudge.
Let’s look next at the real estate developers.
Why not galvanize the MCD and revenue staff of DELHI for this job. They will be extractive in their dealings with contractors but both sets of public servants are already “in” with the real estate crowd. Arm them with point source data on development sites, identified by drones or a wide dispersion of public and private monitoring stations, managed by private service providers who can monitor emission on site- and issue challans to be paid on the spot for exceeding the source emissions limits.
This is better than the hammer blow of GRAP III which stops all construction activities- idling the wages of migrant labour, workers, increasing costs across the supply chain and reducing benefits by idling investment already made.
China cannot afford stranded capital investment. Why should we make the same mistake? Solutions for air pollution should be pro-growth, pro-business, pro-worker and pro-taxpayer.
India has for too long tolerated accommodative domestic emissions norms set at a maximum recordable level of emissions, several times what human beings- not just asthmatics but even blue blood athletes-can safely endure. See the link https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ced6jgg0180o
Now to the farmers of the rural tristate region around Delhi and the post-harvest smog they create.
Per capita income in Delhi is 40% higher than in Haryana, 100% higher than in Western Uttar Pradesh- the two adjacent states. Both are ruled by the same “double engine” government. The MONA (MOdi+NAyab) “double engine: in Haryana and the MOAD (MOdi+ ADityanath) government in Uttar Pradesh are flush with funds.
Why don’t the three states jointly derisk the NCR – and their major cash cow cities – Gurugram and NOIDA and commercial complexes from value depleting harvest related seasonal pollution?
Farmers are commercially savvy. They burn rice residue to save money on cutting and disposing it and to fit within the short three-week window between harvesting of rice and the planting of wheat.
A tri-government joint initiative could offer to fund the time bound cutting and disposal of rice straw through a private or FPO managed operation. A recurring, annual event is a good business and socially rewarding to boot.
The health costs (mostly private) of air pollution are around 3 to 9 percent of GDP. That translates into a potential saving of about Rs 1 to 4 trillion on the combined GDP of about Rs 40 trillion in Haryana, Delhi and Western UP.
The minimum savings on health costs are 3X the existing health expenditure by the tri-states (assuming just one third of the health budget of UP for the adjacent part). Savings can double the health expenditure.
It’s time to be cost savvy. Time to collaborate with the private sector and FPOs for profitable solutions to boost income and low productivity and save on misdirected subsidies which benefit the well-off but ignore the poor.
Let’s work to include this in the NAMO “report card”.
Health hai to wealth kamoyege
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