Air pollution in Delhi – Policy, people and perception

In the recent years, efforts have been made towards tackling the issue. However, they are not creating a dent because the scale of efforts is extremely small vis-à-vis the need, and whatever little is happening lacks efficacy.

The book, The Great Smog of India, noted that more people in India die due to air pollution in a week than total casualties in India-Pakistan wars since independence. If this is the magnitude of the problem, efforts to combat it should have turned into a movement by now. This is where the scale of efforts falls far behind that of the problem. It has taken a few years to build up the level of discourse that we see around air pollution now, but that too is correlated with events such as a spike in the air quality index. Talking about the efficacy of policies to curb air pollution, much of these efforts lack efficiency. Case in point, the apex court’s last-minute decision in 2017 and 2018 to put a ban on fire-crackers in Delhi could have been enforced better had it come a little sooner.

One common factor contributing to limitations noted above is public not playing an active participatory role in these efforts. In order to understand this aspect better, EnvEcologic – which is a premier, fast growing team of Sustainabiltiy & Energy Economist  recently conducted an extensive survey in Delhi, covering over 5,000 respondents spread across the nine districts of the city. Following interesting inferences emerged from the survey:

• 35% of respondents aren’t convinced that air pollution in Delhi is an emergency. This includes 75% of those with children less than 10 years of age. In fact, 20% of all respondents feel the narrative built around it is over-hyped.
• Nearly 60% respondents aren’t convinced that indoor air pollution is a problem in cities and feel that it is less harmful than outdoor air pollution.
• More than 50% respondents are unaware of the ban on garbage burning and that it attracts a penalty of Rs 5,000.

These results are a clear indication of lack of awareness among the residents of the city regarding regulations aimed at curbing air pollution and its health impacts.

Another vital insight with respect to perceived ease of compliance of various air pollution centric policies indicates that the technically ‘best sounding’ policy may not always reverberate with the public, and is thus likelier to fail. For example, nearly 40% respondents confessed their unwillingness to abide by the odd-even policy and over 24% respondents expressed unwillingness to switch from diesel cars to more eco-friendly options.

As a norm, the ‘command and control’ approach has been adopted by Indian policy makers to deal with most large-scale problems such as the air pollution issue. However, in order to succeed at curbing this menace at the national level, the government has to go much beyond merely making policies and expecting the public to tow the line. Some aspects which need to be considered specifically are:

• Pre-determine public’s understanding of the existing problem. Spread awareness about the impact on health and general well-being.
• Take initiatives wherever possible to predetermine public’s response to a potential regulation, and in case it’s not viewed favourably, find out the reasons to understand why they responded in a particular way.
• Step up efforts to educate people about the existing regulations and the rationale behind them. Scale up communication channels multi-fold to ensure that campaigns around air pollution become as popular as those around certain other public welfare campaigns such as those for polio eradication and Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan.

Ploughing the field well for better yield is an ideal analogy to explain the much-required-yet-missing efforts to work closely with people right from the stage of conceiving policies to enforcing them. This is to ensure that we don’t just make the top-down efforts more effective but also sensitize masses for a productive bottom-up contribution as well.

Maji, Kamal Jyoti et al. “Disability-adjusted life years and economic cost assessment of the health effects related to PM2.5 and PM10 pollution in Mumbai and Delhi, in India from 1991 to 2015”

Environmental Science & Pollution Research (2017), https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-016-8164-1

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2542519618302614

Singh, Siddharth. The Great Smog of India (Penguin Random House, 2018), 5.

• Climate Change
• India
• Air Pollution
• World Environment Day 2019

The views expressed above belong to the author(s). ORF research and analyses now available on Telegram! Click here to access our curated content — blogs, longforms and interviews.

PREV NEXT