air pollution

Keeper of the foul air

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This city is essentially uninhabitable from November to January inclusive and barely liveable the rest of the year. Should it even remain the nation’s capital?

I realise Shashi Tharoor is frustrated here — revealing the increasingly evident gap between what the Delhi and the Indian governments can do about air pollution and the scale of improvements on the ground — but Delhi should certainly remain the national capital. Changing this designation because the existing one has become nearly uninhabitable for four months out of 12 is to say the capitalhood of the city is the problem, not the pollution itself. Low hanging fruit but still.

The country’s mainstream press has also been cynical enough to remember there’s an air pollution crisis only when Delhi’s air becomes patently foul, not the air in any other city. Ambient pollution in places like Guwahati and Katihar is also not concentrated in the winter months, although this isn’t to say Delhi’s air is better during the summer. If the national capital moves away from Delhi, the press spotlight will move with it, and rather than deal with Delhi’s pollution now, we’ll all deal with the new capital’s pollution a few years later.

Then again Prime Minister Narendra Modi isn’t bound to go anywhere considering he just had a fancy new parliament built for himself.

Starless city

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Overheard three people in Delhi:

When you feel the rain fall, you feel the dirt pouring down on you, muck streaking down your face and clothes. It washes down the haze from the skies and you can finally breathe clean air and the sky gets so blue. The dust settles. Some 25 drops of water fell on my car and collected all the dirt in runnels. The next morning, my whole car had brown sports of dirt all over it. But the day after the rain, the Sun is really clear and bright in a nice way. You can finally see the stars at night. Like two or three of them!

Reporters in Delhi should get a wintertime allowance

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Featured image credit: souravdas/Flickr, CC BY 2.0.

I recently moved out of Delhi. The air made it easier to decide to leave. What I’ve learnt is that a source of amusement to many friends in the country’s south is actually a nightmare up north, where a five-minute stroll outside can leave you with an irritated throat, watering eyes and the feeling that something is burning its way through your nose. In the week right after Deepavali, you woke up in the morning smelling something toasty; the view through your window was always more orange than it ought to be. You couldn’t go to and return from work without feeling short of breath – irrespective of how you travelled.

The effects of the disaster are undoubtedly classist – and sometimes more than they need to be. Recently, Delhi’s chief minister Arvind Kejriwal announced that air purifiers would be installed at a few major traffic intersections around Delhi to clean up the air. Sarath Guttikunda, a scientist and environmental activist, wrote for The Wire about how insipid the idea is. His article highlights the vacuity of Kejriwal’s desperation, that he would resort to a downstream solution that would affect so few people in the city instead effecting something upstream – at the sources – that would help everyone. What about those who can’t afford air filters? What about those who live on the roads?

The scale of changes that will have to be implemented implies that Delhi’s wintertime pollution problem will maintain its classist manifestation for a few years at least – assuming that the changes are implemented at all. To quote Guttikunda, they are broadly to increase the quality of public transportation and reduce the amount of waste sent to landfills. Now, the issue here is that – assuming you’re a middle-class person with a job that pays 25k to 75k a month – unless your boss is perfectly reasonable and considerate (or is a Kejriwal under pressure to be seen to act), you’re not going to get time off work unless the pollution makes you really sick (i.e. enough to have you bed-ridden for the day).

Delhi has four popular public transportation options: auto, bus, metro and cab (Ola/Uber). There are also rickshaws but they operate over shorter distances. Only the metro is immune to traffic jams; the others contribute to and are stuck in one regularly, especially when going from south Delhi, east Delhi and Gurgaon to central Delhi in the morning and the other way in the evening. If you want to get to work on time, the metro is your best option. Even then, however, given the number of stations together with the size of the city, your odds of finding a metro station that’s close to home as well as close to where you work are really low. You’re going to have to walk, or take an auto/rickshaw, through the crappy air over the course of a few arduous minutes.

What’re these daily minutes of exposure going to do, you ask? Deepak Natarajan, a cardiologist in Delhi, has a list of diseases likelier to beset you after short-term exposure to heightened PM2.5 levels:

  1. Acute myocardial infarction
  2. Unstable angina
  3. Increased likelihood of heart attacks by 8-26%
  4. Heightened risk of thrombosis
  5. Endothelial dysfunction,

and a host of other cardiovascular ailments. As Natarajan writes, air pollution kills more people every year than AIDS and malaria. The next time you’re walking through the smog, feel free to imagine you’re walking through a cloud of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes.

Circling back to the fact that there are no laws securing anyone’s choice to not work – or at least to not have to visit the workplace – with that bilious overhang: consider the plight of journalists. Reporters among them have an especial obligation to spend time on the outside, and the more seasoned among whom hardly ever think about the pollution as a vocational hazard. It’s a job that requires a modicum of physiological fitness that’s simultaneously almost never discussed. In fact, the conversation is swept away by the pretext of a ‘reporter allowance’. I used to receive one at The Hindu, a Rs 1,600 to cover intra-city travelling expenses. But it could cover very little that my salary (then at Rs 30,000) already hadn’t. And this was in Chennai, where the cost of living is lower than that in Delhi.

(Just the way poverty makes all the small, niggling issues in life seem more maddening, a rapidly shrinking set of class-sensitive solutions available to those labouring in wintertime Delhi can drive people similarly close to the edge: such as auto-drivers refusing rides to certain areas, a perpetual shortage of buses and surge pricing. We all know these are not immediately fixable, so how about doing a Kejriwal and heading downstream to check in on your local news-bearers?)

The reasonableness and consideration of your supervisors and employers matters in this context because Delhi’s pollution becomes easier to live through the more privileged you are. And if your editor isn’t considerate enough, then she’s probably assuming pollution affects you the way it does her, which isn’t good if she lives closer to central Delhi. Many media houses*, almost all government offices and all the more-genteel things are located towards the centre, a.k.a. Lutyens’ Delhi, which is marked by open spaces, abundant greenery, its radial outlay and wide roads – all contributing to the reduced prevalence of dust. The cost of living drops as you move further away from this area (with a marked drop once you exit the radial areas). This means the hierarchy in a journalist’s workplace is likely to be mirrored by each employee’s residence’s proximity to Lutyens’ Delhi – evidently, a proximity by proxy to healthiness.

And privilege, as has often been the case, often blinds those who enjoy it to the travails of those who don’t. In this case, it is established by having access to the following (at a cost that doesn’t burn holes in clothing):

  1. A house in a clean neighbourhood away from dusty roads
  2. Abundant greenery in your immediate neighbourhood
  3. An air-conditioner
  4. Air filters/purifiers/fresheners
  5. A car to commute in
  6. A proximate workplace
  7. Clean, well-maintained public spaces
  8. Sufficient time and/or resources to keep the house clean
  9. Affordable medicines and medical assistance

Without access to them, daily life can be quite disorderly, unfulfilling and hard to establish a routine with – especially if you can’t really live dirty without such a state of affairs taking a toll on your productivity and peace of mind. As a result, Delhi’s pollution imposes high entry barriers for healthy living on its residents – barriers that become less surmountable the farther away from the city’s centre you are (to add to which you spend longer to get to the city’s centre). And if you’re a reporter, you’re likelier to have it well and truly harder than most others of your means, thanks (in sum) to central Delhi being cleaner, areas farther more removed from it cheaper, air pollution being easier to live through the more privileged you are, and there being no laws to secure your right to a clean working environment.

To address these issues and even out inequities, reporters in wartime wintertime Delhi should receive an additional allowance as well as shorter and more flexible working hours. Other staffers should also be allowed to work from where they feel comfortable apart from receiving an allowance that will help cover medical expenses, to begin with. (These measures make immediate sense for online news establishments comfortable with decentralised work environments – but they aren’t to exonerate newspaper offices that are used to having everyone work out of a common newsroom.) Those who can’t or won’t should be kept mindful of what they’re asking their journalists to give up and compensate them accordingly as and when the opportunities arise. And even so, no amount of fondness or pride for situating themselves in the national capital can save journalism establishments from the steady toll the city is taking on their journalists.

*Offices are becoming more spread out – but that doesn’t matter.

Beijing’s buildings make for bad breathing but the news from India is worse

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The Wire
June 27, 2015

Breathing in Beijing could be like passive smoking without the short-lived pleasure of a tobacco-high. Writing in The Guardian in December 2014, Oliver Wainwright described an atmosphere akin to one in the aftermath of a nuclear explosion – instead of radioactive particles and clouds of ash, China’s capital city was enveloped in a dense suspension of smoke and dust that refused to blow away. The US Embassy in the city has an air-quality monitor that automatically tweets its readings, and for more than two years now, it has been pinging “Unhealthy”. In January 2013, it briefly went off the charts. During the Beijing marathon last year, many dropped out so they wouldn’t have to pant in the smog.

In fact, it was a sports-related concern back in 2006 that prompted officials to act. Chinese and American scientists were trying to understand how a worsening atmosphere could affect performance in the Beijing Summer Olympics, which was two years away.

They found that fine particulate emissions from the nearby Hebei and Shandong Provinces and the Tianjin Municipality contributed 50-70% of Beijing’s overhang. To improve the air quality, this meant officials couldn’t focus simply on emissions within the city but within the region as a whole, considering the winds carrying the most pollutants flow into Beijing from the south and the southeast. However, the same administration that has committed to reduce coal-burning in and around the city by 2.6 million tonnes by 2017 will be disappointed to find out that a more immovable hurdle now stands in their way.

Data from NASA’s QuikScat satellite show the changing extent of Beijing between 2000 and 2009 through changes to its infrastructure. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Data from NASA’s QuikScat satellite show the changing extent of Beijing between 2000 and 2009 through changes to its infrastructure. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA scientists used data from a space-borne radar to study how Beijing has grown, and how that has affected the patterns of winds blowing in the region. While the city has been expanding in all directions, large-scale constructions are still about to begin in some areas while in others, towering buildings are already silhouetted against the skyline. The lead scientist, Mark Jacobson from Stanford University, developed a technique to see how the wind blows around these areas.

He found that Beijing has acquired an outcrop of buildings that are trapping the air within the city, caging it and preventing it from escaping as easily as it would have if the buildings hadn’t been there. Jacobson stated, “Buildings slow down winds just by blocking the air, and also by creating friction.” And because more buildings cover up more of the soil beneath them, there’s less water evaporating than before, heating up the ground. The result is that there are now parts of Beijing where the air is cooking its own dirt, within a dome circumscribed by retarded winds.

The scientists write in their paper: “The astounding urbanisation … created a ring of impact that decreased surface albedo, increased ground and near-surface air temperatures … and decreased the near-surface relative humidity and wind speed.” The paper was published in the Journal of Geophysical Research on June 19. According to them, even if a city didn’t allow any sources of pollution to operate within its limits, “not even a single gas-powered car”, large structures and winds would result in similar impacts on the atmosphere – leave alone what’s happening in New Delhi.

It’s worse in India

A WHO survey in 2014 found that 13 of the 20 cities with the worst air on the planet were in India. The Economist used data from the survey to estimate that every year 1.6 million Indians lost their lives thanks to the plummeting air quality. The problem was, and is, the worst in the national capital, whose PM2.5 measure stands at 153. To compare, Beijing’s has been hovering between 100-135 in the last few days. PM2.5 refers to solid and liquid particulate matter that’s smaller than 2.5 microns. They are able to sink deep into the lungs and cause lung and heart diseases that can be fatal, so their levels are used by the WHO as indicators of air quality.

To the southwest of Delhi are two other very-polluted cities: Lucknow (PM2.5 100) and Gwalior (PM2.5 144), while further down in that direction is Patna (PM2.5 149). All four cities have been rapidly urbanizing, often at a rate that the region’s electricity generation and distribution system hasn’t been able to keep up with. Many have been able to afford diesel generators for auxiliary power for their homes during power-cuts, and the fumes from those generators have also been contributing to lowering air quality, while their ozone emissions are among the leading reasons why rice- and wheat-crop yields have been falling, too. However, like with Beijing, the cities are also part of a more ‘regional’ assault.

Over 40% of Indonesia’s greenhouse gas emissions are due to peat smoke. Peat is a form of partially decomposed vegetable matter, and the archipelago is home to swaths of peatland that are burnt every year to clear space for the profitable oil palms that fuel a $50 billion industry in the country. As Mike Ives reported in January 2015, the resultant smoke contains large amounts of PM2.5 that’re blown into the mainland, carried into currents that then blow across southeast Asia.

Similarly and closer home, crop-burning is widespread in Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh despite the fact that the activity is prohibited by law in these states. They border New Delhi to the north south and east. The crop-burning came to light recently when images taken by the NASA Aqua satellite were released, in November 2013. They showed a large cloud of smoke floating over western Uttar Pradesh, “obscuring the satellite’s view of cities such as … Lucknow and Kanpur”. The petitioner who took the matter to the National Green Tribunal, Vikrant Tongad, later alleged that had the cloud not wafted over to Delhi to afflict the people of the city, the government wouldn’t have bothered to check on crop-burnings in the three states. In rural areas, the issue is compounded by the widespread use of fuelwood for cooking and heating.

A photo taken by the NASA Aqua satellite shows a pall of smoke hanging over Uttar Pradesh as a result of crop-burning. Credit: NASA
A photo taken by the NASA Aqua satellite shows a pall of smoke hanging over Uttar Pradesh as a result of crop-burning. Credit: NASA

While Beijing may have a better grip on air pollution control than New Delhi does, its problems are indicative of the world’s growing centres of urbanization. As much as civil engineers and planners try to accommodate gardens and lakes into their ideas of the environmentally perfect city, the winds of change will continue to blow in just as strongly from the farms of Punjab, the power plants of Shandong and the peatlands of Indonesia. The problem speaks to the greater challenge of being environmentally conscious about all the developmental projects we undertake instead of thinking about emissions only in terms of the cars in our cities.

Curious Bends – air pollution, menstruation, self-admiration and more

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1. The air that Indians breathe is dangerously toxic

“Last year the WHO assessed 1,622 cities worldwide for PM2.5 and found India home to 13 of the 20 cities with the most polluted air. More cities in India than in China see extremely high levels of such pollution. Especially to blame are low standards for vehicle emissions and fuel. Nor, for different reasons, are rural people better off. Indoor pollution inhaled from dung-fuelled fires, and paraffin stoves and lights, may kill more than 1m Indians a year. The WHO says the vast majority of Indians breathe unsafe air. The human cost is seen in soaring asthma rates, including among children. PM2.5 contributes to cancer and it kills by triggering heart attacks and strokes. Air pollution is likely to cause vastly more deaths as Indians grow older and more obese. Indoor and outdoor pollution combined is the biggest cause of death, claiming over 1.6m lives a year.” (5 min read, economist.com)

2. In India, girls almost never talk to their coaches about period problems

“In a country where menstrual blood is widely considered impure and inauspicious and barely 12% of women have access to sanitary napkins, how do sportswomen in physically demanding sports deal with menstruation and its taboos? How much do periods impact their games? Anju Bobby George, India’s long jump champion from Kerala, won three golds, two silvers and two bronzes at major international competitions between 2002 and 2007. And she is convinced she could have added two more medals to her kitty if it had not been for menstruation.” (6 min read, scroll.in)

3. Wealthy Chinese kids are twice as likely to be nearsighted as the poor

“East Asia’s high levels of childhood myopia, also known as nearsightedness, has long been a mystery: It affects as many as 90% of urban 18-year-olds. Researchers have identified possible causes including intensive studying, less time spent outside—even the Chinese language itself. And now a new study has made the mystery even stranger.” (2 min read, qz.com)

4. Mongolians have decided the country’s future by text message

“Mongolians received a text message last week. It asked them to reply to vote for one of two futures for the country: budget cuts and economic austerity, or the controversial expansion of copper and gold mines, which could bring in billions of dollars in foreign investment.” (2 min read, qz.com)

5. When Indian scientists can’t show humility, what can you expect from its politicians?

“India’s most famous and highly decorated scientist is C.N.R. Rao, a Fellow of the world’s most prestigious scientific academies, and a recipient of his country’s highest honour, the Bharat Ratna. Some years ago, an admirer decided to lobby the Bangalore Municipality to name the circle outside the Indian Institute of Science (of which Rao had been director) after the great man. Now circles and roads are normally not named after living people. But here was C.N.R. Rao in the flesh, actually present when a circle named after him was being inaugurated.” (7 min read, telegraphindia.com)

Chart of the week

“No one knows how long the change will take. Lots of bright ideas exist for tackling air pollution. Their widespread implementation, however, depends to a great degree on how much the public makes a fuss about inaction. As lorry drivers might say, honk please.” (More on economist.com)

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