The need for cooperative and joint efforts by both the Centre and the disparate States of the Union and the Union Territories is urgent not only because of the compulsions of global cooperation for the green cause but also because India has become one of the worst habitations across the universe for sustainable living. This is all the more so if the existing ill-treatment to environment and the fauna and flora is not balanced with precautionary policies to forestall an ecological apocalypse.

Recent aberrations in weather patterns including onset of unseasonal rains partly explains the problem the country is encountering for being smug on the eco front. A survey of the World Health Organization (WHO) last year noted with dismay that India’s capital city Delhi was the most polluted in the world with an annual average of 153 micrograms of the most dangerous small particulates, known as PM2.5 per cubic metre. This was six times the WHO’s recommended maximum, 12 times US standards and more than twice the level deemed safe by the domestic authorities.

What is worse during winter when lower temperature and fire harden and intensify the pollution concentrations to PM 2.55 with other pollutants spiking much higher, reaching levels that are described by experts as hazardous for humans? It is not that the problem is restricted to Delhi alone as thirteen of the dirtiest 20 cities in the world were in India, the WHO wryly noted.

Yet another survey –the Environmental Preference Index—ranked India 155 out of the 178 countries for air quality last year. The WHO has found that India has the world’s highest rates of death from respiratory ailments, with 159 per one lakh in 2012, around ten times that of Italy, five times that of Britain and twice that of the Middle Kingdom. With this sort of somber statistics, no amount of cosmetic declarations or lip-sympathy would do and it is time that a plan of action for preservation of environment and arresting its degradation inflicted by human activities across the country as agreed by the Environment and Forest Ministers of the Centre and States got priority implementation it duly deserves.

For a capital city that by court order switched its public transport vehicular fuel to compressed natural gas (CNC) in place of the highly-polluting and adulterated diesel some seventeen years ago, the subsequent improvements this wrought on the living quality air had unfortunately become a mere flash in the pan. In the aftermath of the ongoing urbanization and reckless construction activities across the city including massive digging and raising of huge concrete structures for prestigious projects like metro rail, not to speak of the housing and office building activities that go unimpeded in the face of civic bodies’ dubious regulatory vigilance, Delhi is now back to its pollution level of the past as its air quality is turning egregiously noxious. The Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), a non-governmental but public spirited body lending legitimacy in the otherwise cacophonic discourse marking ecological issues, came out with an agenda for action years ago, laying out the roadmap for fuel-emission standards, restrictions on diesel vehicles and the transition to a much cleaner fuel, CNG.

The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) in a comprehensive Emissions Gap Report in November 2014 mentioned that emissions from fossil fuels and biomass burning account for the majority of energy-related air pollution. The emitted substances include particulate matter (PM), precursors of tropospheric (the lower layer of atmosphere) ozone (O3), nitrogen oxides (NO2), sulphur dioxide (SO2), carbon monoxide (CO) and organic compounds and metals. These compounds have a range of ravaging impacts.

It cited the most recent global burden of disease report which reckoned that in 2010, there were 3.5 million premature deaths from indoor smoke from solid fuels and another three million premature deaths were caused from urban air pollution the world over. Nearly one lakh premature deaths could have been precluded annually in Brazil, China, the European Union, India, Mexico and the United States by 2030 through energy efficiency measures in the transport, buildings and industrial sectors. These are the three important areas where domestic action plans to stem the spurious smokes that seamlessly mesh up in the air need to be put in place before the ticking bomb detonates to take a lethal toll of lost or impaired human lives.

Even as the air is replete with risky particulates that might do lasting damage to fragile physiques by hitting the respiratory organs implacably, the Minister of State for Environment, Forests & Climate Change, Mr. Prakash Javadekar admitted in a written response to a query from seven concerned MPs in the Lok Sabha that the Government has not conducted any study to assess the disease burden of air pollution in the country! However, he said, the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) had entrusted three epidemiological studies on the impact of air pollution on health—two in urban areas and one in rural area to Chittaranjan National Cancer Institute, Kolkata, he said.

But the findings of the studies do corroborate unpleasant upshots ranging from several pulmonary and systematic changes, altered immunity and damage to chromosomes and DNA and other health impairments associated with cumulative exposure to high level of particulate pollution, though it laced it with caution that it could not be the sole cause of these unhealthy outbreaks. Such a facile or business-as-usual approach to existential threat would not sit well if the air pollution and the attendant weather-related aberrations do not compel the policy makers to bestir themselves into action.

Experts caution that there is no dearth of solutions to address and redress the problems of lop-sided developments that do not take on board the due ecological balance for a sane course to sustainable progress. It is for the authorities to adopt and adapt the right policy measures so that posterity will not curse its predecessors for being prodigal and imprudent. The High-level Committee headed by the former Cabinet Secretary Mr. T.S.R. Subramanian to review the existing environmental laws hit the nail on the head stating that “the need to preserve and indeed enhance the quality of the environment is paramount and inviolate”. But the paramountcy is passé and violations have become the new normal! (IPA Service)