The pollution precipice

In a metaphorical sense, it would be prudent to equate air with life. Yet, call it another irony of human civilisation, we have been killing the life-sustaining air, all through our existence.

On the day following Diwali, things were smoggy for Delhi and other cities. Nothing was visible across, except the crisis that stared us in our face. It was a worrying sight, but not shocking. Almost every resident of the city knew it would come — the curious element was that in what magnitude! Apart from the extremes observed post-Diwali, air pollution has been silently killing millions of people year after year and making life tough for a huge population that dwells in the city — some out of aspiration, but most out of necessity. Though lately there has been rancour around the pollution issue, mostly irrelevant and pointless.

To make things worse, politics has made sure that the air pollution debate is constrained around a limited category of pollution sources like stubble burning and firecrackers — pushing the prominent polluters behind the curtain. Political debates are no more than mudslinging, and distract general masses from the real issues at hand — the issues that are flagged by research analysts.

In this article, we shall retrospect what is the range of factors that contribute to air pollution, what effect it has on various sections of societies, what has failed us to date in making positive headway in this direction, and finally, what could be a pathway that would allow us to breathe clean air.

Sector-wise contribution

To reduce emissions of pollutants like particulate matter and oxides of nitrogen, sulphur, carbon etc., we need to first specify targets. And to specify the targets, we require an estimate around which sectors contribute how much to air pollution. Now there is a big catch here, we don't exactly know that. The estimates provided by different inventories vary from each other — leading to a sort of inconclusiveness. Council for Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW) analysed the estimates from three global emission inventories — EDGAR, ECLIPSE, REAS — and two domestic inventories — SMoG and TERI — to ascertain the variability in estimates for various pollutants. CEEW found that the total variability for all polluting agents, except PM10, falls within the 25 per cent range — for PM2.5 the variability was found to be 37 per cent. The Council, however, in clearest terms, put an endnote that "the variability does not affect our ability to plan for achieving the National Clean Air Programme target for reducing particulate concentrations by 20-30 per cent by 2024." At the same time, it also recommended setting up of an integrated national database for the purpose — something which should be taken seriously by the government on a priority basis — if there is even an iota of seriousness around tackling the pollution menace.

For the sake of establishing a qualitative understanding of the contributing sectors, we may club them under two heads — 1) seasonal: stubble burning in neighbouring states and firecracker bursting; and 2) perennial: vehicular emissions, industrial emissions, household emissions and dust. Of course, Delhi's geographical location is also a pervading factor that enables the suspension of polluting particles at lower than the average height during winters.

Stubble burning: Despite being a relatively low contributor to air pollution, stubble burning remains the most heated issue — the reason, quite obvious, is the political storm behind it.

As far as the public perception goes, a narrative appears to shape up where ignorant farmers in northern states are considered the main part of the problem. Amid this, the real issues of governance and policy failure are pushed to the backfoot.

Now consider this, more than 683 million tonnes (Mt) of crop residues of different crops are produced, of which a major part is used as fodder, fuel, and in various industrial processes. Despite this, about 178 Mt of surplus crop residues are available around the country (TIFAC 2018). As per the 2019 estimate of The Energy and the Resource Institute (TERI), around 87 Mt of surplus crop residues is burnt in different croplands. The challenge of managing the burnable crop residue is certainly not insurmountable if the required political will is present.

One of the major drawbacks of the Green Revolution was that it blurred the geographical division in the Indo-Gangetic plain across which rice and wheat were grown. Thanks to the advent of High Yielding Variety seeds, now wheat and rice can be grown on the same land — leading to unprecedented groundwater level depletion. Temperature requirements for growing rice and wheat make it imperative for the farmers to sow wheat seeds after a gap of mere 20-25 days from the rice harvest, ahead of winters in north India. This gap was further cut short after the passing of the Preservation of Subsoil Water Act, 2009 — aimed at restoring the depleted groundwater level — by the Punjab government, followed by the Haryana government.

Removing the residue from the fields requires the involvement of labour and capital. What incentive does a farmer have to invest in such activities? Also, how prudent is it to leave the management of crop residue to the moral responsibility of the farmers?

Household emissions: Often overlooked, household emissions are one of the major sources of pollution in India. The pan-India perennial culture of burning biomass across the country has an unimaginable cumulative effect on air quality.

The burning of biomass fuels in rural households is a very tangled problem that is related not just to air pollution, but also to public health, gender disparity, social injustice and whatnot. It is completely inhumane that women in large numbers of rural households are forced to cook daily on mud chulha, which are no less than chimneys of the black shoot — a thick layer of which on the rooftop can be seen in each household. It is no wonder then that rural women keep languishing under poor health conditions — risking the lives of their children as well, even the unborn. As per a WHO study of 2016, the use of solid biomass in inefficient cookstoves reportedly causes an estimated 1.3 million premature deaths every year in India. Apart from this, TERI reported that in 2017, around 15.8 million Disability Adjusted Life Years were attributed to household air pollution.

The transition from biomass-based fuel to cleaner fuels like LPG, natural gas, solar energy etc., is no doubt an imperative that is taking rather too long to be implemented. A 2019 study by Petroleum Planning and Analysis stated that the total number of LPG connections in urban and rural households in India had been growing at a compounded annual growth rate of only seven per cent from 2007-08 to 2017-18.

The present government at the Centre has done a commendable job in making LPG cylinders accessible to a large number of rural households under the PMUY. This has helped improve the situation a bit. But the headway made therein was offset by dismally low rates of cylinder refilling in India and skyrocketing prices of LPG cylinders.

Vehicular emissions: A 2018 study by TERI showed that the transportation sector is among the leading contributors to the PM 2.5 composition in the air. After the dust (28 per cent) and industry (26 per cent), transportation (23 per cent) stood only third — way ahead of other pollutants like agricultural burning (five per cent) and residential emissions (nine per cent).

Now that transportation is a genuine need of the rising India, the sector has to develop at its own pace. The real merit of the policymakers will be reflected in the manner they manage the composition of the existing fleet. In simplest terms, there are some vehicles that contribute more air pollution than others. While commercial vehicles constitute only around five per cent of the total fleet, they contribute 80 per cent of the total PM emissions. Furthermore, old vehicles (those manufactured before the year 2000) contribute tens of times more pollution than modern vehicles. The major part of the solution then is fleet modernization which is discussed in the solution segment below.

Solutions

Plain and simple, if a variegated bunch of causal components are adding to the humongous pool of the monstrous problem, we need to hit out at each of those — simultaneously. It is the human actions — from cooking food to travelling to excessively using industrial products — in all walks of life that add up to form a problem of such monstrous proportion. The solution would require a change in how humans act — the earlier we make these changes, the smarter we shall be labelled.

Right since the establishment of the Central Pollution Control Board in 1974, India has slowly but steadily progressed on the path to cleaning the air. January 2019 marks a milestone in this direction, when India's flagship scheme in this pursuit — National Clean Air Plan — was launched by the MoEFCC to reduce PM2.5 pollution by 20–30 per cent by 2024 as compared to 2017, in 122 cities.

The NCAP programme is primarily aimed at the capacity building of CPCB and SPCBs. Under the programme, the National Green Tribunal had directed the non-attainment cities to submit detailed plans for achieving clean air. The cities came out with the plans, but those are still at a very nascent stage. Further, studies have found a lot of lacunae — including unscientific prioritizing of sectors, lack of proper financial proposals etc. NCAP could no doubt prove out to be a gamechanger if evolved as per requirements and implemented properly. But apart from this, the government must carry out existing plans and policies to mitigate air pollution — from each point of its genesis on a war footing.

Stubble burning: The available solutions to reduce stubble burning are the use of PUSA decomposers and Crop Residue Management (CRM) machines. Agriculture intensive states like Punjab and Haryana have deployed a significant number of these machines but still, the results are unfavourable. Reason? Farmers shy away from these innovations for their own set of reasons, including 1) logistical problems; 2) lack of awareness and 3) inertial problems.

So, all in all, you have the required technology. Then there are farmers who need these technologies and there is the government that is willing to promote these innovations. The lacking component is the proper interlinking of these three components. The onus lies on the government to communicate with the target beneficiaries (farmers) about the pros and cons of using / not using these innovations — through whatever medium that is fit for the purpose. Apart from using convenient communication tools like social media, traditional media, direct messaging etc., the administration could do well to use spin doctors (the persons of influence in villages who have significant mass appeal and are trusted among the people). This could prove to be highly beneficial. We all know that communication makes things simpler. So, why lose out on it when the matter is related to something as vital as the air we breathe.

It would be prudent here to mention that communication not just has to be top-down. Farmers are known to have some legitimate concerns regarding renting and the use of crop residue management machines. The bottleneck is not going to be removed until the government reaches out to people, takes in their grievances, and accordingly incorporates required provisions in the existing frame of things. Farmers' actions, to a great extent, are the result of the incentives and disincentives of government policies. Perhaps policy reshuffling is the need of the hour. The government should also go a step ahead to ensure that sky-rocketing fuel prices don't de-popularise critical technologies.

Household fuels: The solution again for reducing household air pollution is straight and simple — have cleaner fuels, particularly the LPG cylinders as a steady replacement of biomass fuels. The solution is twisted by several factors including — the monetary burden of regular refilling of 14.2 kg cylinders for low-income families, an inertial reluctance to switch from biomass fuel to LPG even in well-off rural families.

TERI has recommended two solutions to the problem — 1) it recommends promoting LPG through additional monetary support on an interim basis through a revenue-neutral approach. TERI recommends the leveraging of pollution cess to meet the monetary cost requirements for the proposed scheme. The study further argues that any extra cost incurred will be recovered as savings from the reduced health burden in the country. The second recommendation has been to use 5-kg LPG cylinders parallelly to the 14.2-kg cylinders. The recommendation has been made in the light that the rate of refilling of big cylinders in rural areas was abysmally low.

These recommendations certainly hold merit as the challenge in this direction is to break the dual barrier of low-income base and inertial factors. Once the rural population is made used to the safer fuels, they will, in most likelihood, get going. Such an initiative from the government will not only help put a check on a perennial source of air pollution for neighbouring cities but also improve maternal and children health by a significant margin.

Views expressed are personal