The Bombay High Court has been hearing the suo moto PIL on air pollution for years now, and recent hearings exemplify the fundamental problems which have resulted in our AQI crisis – we lack the data we need to meaningfully identify sources of pollution, and we certainly don’t enforce measures to curtail pollution.
The Government of India’s response in parliament to the effect that there is no data directly correlating high AQI and lung diseases has garnered some attention. However, no one has called out that there do not seem to be any initiatives underway to collect and collate this data. That there seems to be a connection – correlational or causal – is clear since the same Government response addresses the “…development of material targeting Air Pollution related illnesses…”
This data scarcity is endemic as far as concerns air pollution in our country. In hearings earlier this week, the Bombay High Court noted inter alia that several pollution sensors installed are not functioning.
It is telling that the High Court had to call out the delta between the lived experience of pollution control guidelines not being enforced at construction sites and the ostensible efforts which the BMC has made to enforce those guidelines. The BMC’s apparent paper trail, the data, if you will, suggests that it has acted appropriately. Life in the city suggests otherwise, and a pollution sensor network which does not address the spatial variations and population density in our megacity (and arguably all our urban agglomerations) leaves us, and the Courts, operating in a vacuum.
Mega Crisis, Little Attention
It is amazing that the most significant health crisis we’ve faced after the pandemic garners so little attention. We are, as I have always said, aligned by breath – we breathe the same air, and every breath now includes vast amounts of pollutants which are clearly inimical to health. The sporadic media reports equating a day’s breathing in Mumbai or Delhi to smoking [some astronomically high number of] cigarettes are read and followed by all of us blithely carrying on.
At the very least, we’re ignoring the existing and incipient economic costs we’re incurring; reductively, health care costs a lot, and what we know of the health consequences of our AQI Crisis is alarming even in this limited sense.
There are many factors which have brought us to this point. Fragmented regulation, aspirational policies with limited to non-existent real-world application and consequence, and a very real need to balance our aspirational clean air objectives and the demands of our growing economy.
To me, all of these follow from the two principal lacunae: the absence of data and the absence of direct fiscal incentives and disincentives. All the other factors, and this article lists only a few, cannot be addressed without first addressing these principal lacunae.
Why Data Matters
Data is crucial. We need to understand the pollution in our localities and where it comes from. Illustratively, the air quality sensor network in Mumbai has improved significantly over the years, but it does not cover every ward when it should cover every locality in every ward. We need to move towards increasing the number of sensors by using appropriately calibrated, low-cost, locality dense sensor networks, which feed into the existing information flow. We desperately need a functioning data spine to monitor pollution and attribute sources.
Source attribution raises another data lacuna: As much as we regard ourselves as Maximum City and Urbs Prima, we are part of the MMR airshed and need to understand air pollution in that context, especially given the daily land and sea breezes, which we can reasonably assume help air pollution move across the MMR. Does pollution from the larger MMR, in fact, affect the city? Lived experience and layperson reasoning suggest that it does, but we know only that we do not know.
These issues must be addressed if we are to make any progress towards understanding the air we breathe and the impact it has. Transparently sharing data will also help build awareness and reduce the health – or economic, if that is more resonant – consequences of our AQI crisis. I must note that this and more have been called out in the Air Quality Monitoring, Emission Inventory, and Source Apportionment study for Mumbai, undertaken by the MPCB, CSIR–NEERI, and IIT Bombay in 2023, but, manifestly, little has been done to execute these recommendations.
In parallel, we need to incentivise enforcement. A structure of fiscal incentives and disincentives effected through taxation and budgetary allocations can change the apparent apathy of our regulatory mechanisms. India has recent and successful experience with these mechanisms, and we should build on this experience to address our crisis of breath.
Of course, all of this requires a significant policy initiative and stronger legislative will, l but we must start moving in this direction. Until then, we will continue to see the air we breathe and will paradoxically not know what we’re seeing.
(The author is a Managing Partner at Bharucha & Partners)
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