Interview
The aim is pollution control, not theatre: Sunita Narain
I don’t want to get into this great game of the Delhi
government — every time there is this chaos they say,
‘What about Punjab? Punjab did it!’ I think it’s time
we grew up and I would really urge our politicians to
grow up because otherwise they are taking away our
lives and the lives of our children.
If we oppose every solution to the problem of air pollution,
how will we ever breathe clean air, asks the environmentalist.
E
nvironmentalist Sunita Narain has been fighting
for clean air for decades. The Delhi-based Cen-
tre for Science and Environment, with which she has
been associated and now serves as director general,
led the shift to compressed natural gas in Delhi, to re-
duce air pollution. Ms. Narain is on the statutory body
set up under the Environment Protection Act as well
as the Environment Pollution (Prevention and Con-
trol) Authority (EPCA), a Supreme Court-appointed
panel to monitor pollution in the Delhi-National Cap-
ital Region (NCR). Excerpts from an interview on the
magnitude of the problem and the way forward:
Every breath we are inhaling at the moment is
toxic. How have we reached this point?
Nobody is really serious about pollution is all I can
say. It’s not sudden. In fact, pollution last year was
worse than it is this year. What we don’t realise is that
we aren’t taking adequate steps to bring down pollu-
tion. Whatever we are doing is too little, too late.
The kind of pollution that we are seeing now is in the
entire region — it’s not just Delhi; Patna is more pol-
luted. Anywhere you start placing pollution monitor-
ing equipment, you realise that the air you breathe is
toxic.
Are the governments doing too little, too late? With
every episode of severe air pollution, there is a mad
rush to enforce urgent but temporary measures.
Absolutely! Please understand that the odd-even (car
scheme) and the shutting of schools are all emergency
actions. Last year, when we had a crisis like this in
November, we had gone to court and said that there
are two ways in which governments all over the world
deal with this. One is that they have an emergency
response, which is that when things are so bad they
ask, ‘what do we do?’ Last year, nobody knew what
to do; there was a sort of helplessness. And two, what
we said (to the court) was that emergency plans are
not substitutes for long-term measures. We need both
because till you have your long-term measures kick-
ing in, we must have a response.
Do we have the infrastructure to bring in long-
term and emergency measures to ensure that we
don’t find ourselves in this state again?
In our case we have no public transport. Because for
four years you have done nothing about it besides
blaming and passing the buck. Today what we have
is a governance crisis. You remain in an emergency
mode if you don’t deal with this crisis.
The facts of this crisis today are scary. We are in
severe-plus (air quality) today, but we are in severe
plus when every action in the book has been direct-
ed — construction is banned, industries are banned,
thermal plants have been shut down, brick kilns have
Are Punjab and Haryana to be blamed?
been banned, generator sets have been banned, the so-
This time, Punjab and Haryana also contributed be- called public transport system has been intensified...
cause of crop burning. But remember, in the months The only thing we haven’t been able to do is to take
to come, when winter is severe, even when this factor the cars off the road. And despite all this, we are in se-
(crop burning) goes, we will still have pollution. Last vere-plus mode. It just tells you the scale of the prob-
year, the peak came in December and January.
lem and the scale of the intervention that is needed.
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