WHO's most polluted list names 14 Indian cities: Fragile Air Act, lax pollution boards and emission standards to blame

It is not daily discomfort but a WHO report that makes pollution a talking point in India, albeit briefly. The recent report revealed that 14 of the 20 most polluted cities in the world are in fact Indian. This time though, the national capital doesn’t top the charts. It is Kanpur, where nearly 2.9 million live and breathe. And Kanpur isn’t the only city on the list from the country’s most populous Uttar Pradesh. Varanasi, where an economy of Hindu faith operates; Lucknow, the political capital of the state; and Agra, where stands the Taj Mahal, have also found a place on the list. Gaya, where stands the tree under which Buddha found enlightenment and Bihar’s capital city Patna have landed up on the list as well, with particular matter levels as high as 144 and 149 (micrograms per cubic metre) respectively. The national capital is on the sixth spot, a slight improvement from its number four spot in 2015. But, the presence of its industrial offshoots Gurgaon and Faridabad on the list re-emphasises the magnitude of Delhi’s problem, which is much larger than crop burning versus cracking bursting debate that accompanies the grey smog at least once every year. The blanket of polluted air hovers over Punjab and Rajasthan and stretches up to Srinagar in Kashmir. [caption id=“attachment_4219361” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Representational image. AP[/caption] The first part of the problem is centred on the Air (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act, 1981. One single unit that discharges air pollution, be it a hotel or an industrial unit, requires consent to operate under the said act. However, the act doesn’t have provisions to deal with leaf or wood burning on the street which is a daily affair. In March, when a Hindu charitable organisation Shri Ayutchandi Mahayagna Samiti summoned 350 priests to drop cow ghee over 50,000 logs of mango wood in a nine-day-long yagya, supposedly to fumigate and purify air, social media was abuzz with how ridiculously counter-productive the thought was. _Firstpost_ had hit ground zero and found that the disdain towards pollutants was selective and other polluting sources that had a permanence attached to them, like a kilometre-long lane in Meerut that serves as permanent cremation ground for stolen and discarded automobiles, were never at the centre of the national discourse on environmental activism. Ritwick Dutta, an environmental lawyer and the managing trustee for the organisation Legal Initiative for Forest and Environment, had spoken to Firstpost about the Uttar Pradesh Pollution Control Board (UPCCB) issuing notifications on a ban on leaf and garbage burning. Under this, burning of dry leaves was prohibited but wood burning wasn’t because people use wood for cooking. Also, there was no limit set on the quantity of wood. For example, after Odisha’s Rath Yatra, wooden carts are burnt and remade. Who should be held accountable? In a country of 125 crore residents, National Crime Records Bureau data from 2014 to 2016 shows that under the Air Act, there were 48 incidents registered in 2014, 50 in 2015 and 25 in 2016. Dutta told Firstpost that virtually nobody has been convicted under the act. There are two reasons for this, one is that the accused is required to appear before a judicial magistrate and face a trial, for which the state pollution boards need to exhibit agility and strengthen their intelligence skills. The Ganga judgment (MC Mehta versus Union of India, pronounced on 13 July, 2017) made these shocking revelations about the competence levels of the Uttar Pradesh Pollution Control Board (UPPCB). According to the UPPCB, there are only 1,048 seriously or grossly polluting industries and these industries were on the radar of the UPPCB. However, the judgment specified, “… large numbers of industries are being referred non-water polluting industries and/or dry industries or small-scale industries which indulge in dry processes. The Board is incapacitated to check the performance of the plants and discharge of effluents, strictly within the prescribed measures at regular intervals.” The judgment made observations about the operational strategies of the UPPCB, that it relies on inspection and investigation as their primary strategies and the regulatory response is subjective and in ‘firefighting mode. The other problem, pointed out’by the judgment, was that the body relies on internal resources (namely: people, laboratories) and observed that in order to become an effective 361 regulator, it needs to supplement this with external resources. It further noted that it couldn’t produce any inventory of polluting sources and relied on the consent data and identified the need to strengthen its IT, public interaction, research and technology assessment functions.

The second and often ignored aspect is that the disposition of air changes every hour, every day and the evidence of the pollution caused is difficult to record. Lawyers like Ritwick recommend traffic policing mechanism of challans in which punishments are handed out instantly.

The Ganga judgment took cognizance of the absence of a transparent and consistent enforcement mechanism and recommended that the Water Act and Air Act provide for various regulatory responses in terms of directions, a prosecution that is based on Precautionary Principle and Polluter Pays Principle. The UPPCB’s website certainly flashes ambient air quality records from up to 24 cities but these cities are covered under what’s called the Continuous Ambient Air Quality Monitoring Stations (CAAQM) system of testing that makes use of a small device with filter paper and its reports are sent to labs. Ravi Shekhar of The Climate Agenda, an NGO that has installed air monitoring devices in 43 districts of Uttar Pradesh including Yogi Adityanath’s Gorakhpur, said that the government must shift to National Air Quality Monitoring (NAAQM) which is monitored live. He alleged that in Varanasi, the pollution control board is under-staffed which sometimes results in four people managing six to seven districts. Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) announced the National Clean Air Programme (NCAP) on 18 December, 2017, in the Rajya Sabha. One of its objectives was to identify ’non-attainment cities’. It is mentioned in the concerned ministry’s document that these are cities the Central Pollution Control Board has identified, in which the prescribed NAAQS has been violated. These cities have been identified based on ambient air quality data obtained (2011-2015) under the National Air Quality Monitoring Programme (NAMP). Strangely, not a single city from Bihar made it to the list of 100 non-attainment cities. Three cities in Bihar: Patna, Gaya and Muzaffarpur are on WHO’s report of the top 14 polluted cities in India. Ankita Jyoti, who works with Centre for Environment and Energy Development (CEED), an organisation working on pollution in Bihar, told Firstpost that Patna has only one air quality monitoring station inside the Indira Gandhi Planetarium. “To monitor air quality in a city as large as Patna (99.97 km²), at least five monitoring stations are needed in residential and industrial areas,” Jyoti said, lamenting on the lack of any monitoring stations in cities like Bhagalpur (covered under the smart city project). “In 2014, the Bihar Pollution Control Board released a report along with other research organisations and it was based on data from 2012 when solid fuel burning contributed to 21 percent of Patna’s pollution. Back-dated data is of no value in a pollution report,” Jyoti’s guess is that many big and small cities in Bihar are silently choking up and because of a lack of ways to research and monitor, frightening truths are still unknown. Meanwhile, CEED released a report on Patna in 2017 which revealed that the annual average concentration of PM2.5 in Patna was 138.6 µg/m³, which was four and 14 times more than the national standard and WHO safety limits respectively and the monthly mean concentration of particulate matter (PM2.5) was recorded to be the highest in the month of November (263 µg/m3), followed by December (254 µg/m3 ) and January (206 µg/m3) in 2017. This was around the same time the national capital’s smog was making one national headline after another. Madhulika Varma, media specialist at Greenpeace India (the India wing of Greenpeace, a non-profit NGO, with a presence in 55 countries across Europe, the Americas, Asia and the Pacific) told Firstpost that the NCAP had outsourced all responsibility to states by only focussing on 100 cities which thereby ignores polluting sectors like industry and coal thermal power plants that are regulated by the central government. For the NCAP to be effective, a regional approach that factors in the emission by industry and power units is needed, is what Greenpeace India considers imperative to a cleaner India. Greenpeace India praised the NCAP for allocation of specific budget for strengthening air quality monitoring and forecasting mechanism, a plan to augment the air quality monitoring index and the inclusion of an air quality management plan its 100 non-attainment cities. “Greenpeace India had accessed the NCAP draft (which is in the public domain today) through an RTI application. The RTI responses from the environment ministry had a mention of 35 percent and 50 percent emission targets in three and five years respectively. However, the emission targets were missing when the ministry uploaded the draft on its website for public comments on 17 April, 2018,” Varma explained and shared a copy of the RTI with _Firstpost:_In 2017, Greenpeace India released a report titled Airpocalypse: Assessment of Pollution in Indian Cities, which had assessed the pollution levels for cities in Punjab: “PM10 concentrations in Amritsar, Jalandhar, Ludhiana, Mandi Gobindgarh, Khanna and Bhatinda were respectively 184,151, 139, 130, 122 and 111 µg/m3for year 2015 and PM10 concentrations in Alwar, Jaipur, Kota and Udaipur were respectively 227, 171, 134 and 156 µg/m3for year 2015,” “In Rajasthan, concentrations in four cities where the data was available from pollution control board were higher than the annual average of 60 µg/m3asprescribed under NAAQS and in Punjab, concentrations in all 14 cities where the data was available from pollution control board were higher than the annual average of 60 µg/m3as prescribed under NAAQS.” Meanwhile, in Jodhpur Rajasthan, Bansilal Bhinjana, a human rights activist is relieved that the truth of his city has come out in front of the world. Two cities from Rajasthan: Jaipur and Jodhpur feature in WHO’s report. He narrated a story of how he started working in marble mines in Makrana at the age of 16 and has seen workers die because of inhalation of crystalline silica dust in stone quarries. He said that in the last week, one person from a Maghlasiya and another one from Lordi Daijagra (both in Jodhpur district) had died of silicosis. According to Bhinjana’s own research, 1,456 people have died of silicosis since 2007. Rajasthan notified silicosis under the Rajasthan Epidemic Diseases Act, 1957, on 22 January, 2015. Bhinjana feels the pollution control boards should keep the big and small industries in check because strict punitive action against anybody flouting an environmental law can save the lives of labourers. Finally, the WHO report also busted the myth that cities on higher altitudes are cleaner by putting Srinagar on the 10th spot. In a 2018 paper titled Winter Burst of Pristine Kashmir Valley Air, data was obtained as part of the project Modeling Atmospheric Pollution And Networking (MAPAN) undertaken by Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), Pune and University of Kashmir. The findings of the report indicate that the air quality of Srinagar deteriorates significantly during winter and the PM2.5 touches a soaring 348 μg/m³ against the Indian permissible limit of 60 μg/m³. Cold temperatures with dry conditions along with alarming levels of biofuel emissions from the domestic sector, the report suggests, are majorly responsible for this kind of winter period particulate pollution.