With the onset of winter, one of the great talking points of the nation is the high levels of air pollution in the cities of urban India, in particular Delhi, the national capital. A thick cover of smog — defined by Merriam-Webster’s dictionary as “a fog made heavier and darker by smoke and chemical fumes, a photochemical haze” — envelopes Delhi and the cities of the Indo-Gangetic plain. It’s now well-established that the main causes of the smog are a thick cover of smoke emanating from the wheat fields of Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh — where farmers burn the stubble of their wheat fields of the kharif season and prepare to plant rice in the rabi or winter season — which mixes with untreated factory pollutants and nitrogen emanating from automobile emissions, especially diesel-driven vehicles. This deadly mixture which cannot be dissipated by the weak sunlight of winter is very harmful to human beings and causes lung and liver diseases, asthma and pneumonia among a host of ailments which debilitate the population.
Self-evidently, the farmers of the foodgrain bowls have to be persuaded to use the readily available — although more expensive — tractor technology for uprooting their kharif stubble; industry has to be prevented from releasing untreated pollutants into the atmosphere and the automobile industry has to switch to cleaner fuels and diesel fuel usage has to be discouraged. However, a curious oriental fatalism seems to have gripped the Central and state governments and indeed the intelligentsia and middle class public, which seem unready to pay the price of these overdue reforms even as they threaten life itself.
Several studies indicate that in terms of per capita income, Delhi is the richest state of India. Therefore, the natural response of the state and Central governments and the citizenry should be a consensus for the middle class to pay a pollution cess to collect sufficient funds for the Punjab and Haryana governments to invest massively in tractors which could uproot the kharif stubble of farms in that region free of charge. Yet, such is the greed and selfishness of the pampered Delhi intelligentsia, elites and middle class that this obvious solution has never surfaced in the myriad passionate debates on the subject of reducing the deadly air pollution that is quite literally, killing the citizenry.
Moreover, an obvious solution to automobile pollution is to improve and expand public transport. Yet recently when the Delhi Metro Rail Network proposed a modest fares hike after a nine-year fares freeze, the city’s spoilt public raised a massive hue and cry supported by the Delhi state government which is always at loggerheads with the Central government which also has jurisdiction over Delhi. This subsidies-addicted pampered lot who refuse to help themselves — even at the cost of chronic diseases and death — deserve what they are getting.