Delhi needs clean air, free Wi-Fi can wait

Periodically we keep getting "alerts" on appalling air quality in Delhi and other Indian cities from international and national bodies like the World Health Organisation, research papers published in top journals like The Lancet and action groups like Greenpeace and the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE). Questions are asked and answered in the parliament and television studios. Meanwhile, life goes on as usual on Delhi's streets with air getting fouler.

If anyone wishes to assess the impact of rising air pollution in the city, all one needs to do is visit office of any pediatrician. You will find kids of all ages - from toddlers to tweens- out on nebulisers. They are supposed to be used in an emergency to deliver medication for respiratory ailments. But in children's clinics in the capital, the emergency has become the routine.

Last week, I was at a lecture-cum-demo on an indoor air purifier being held in a private hospital in South Delhi. At the end of the talk, when the quality of air was measured in the swanky auditorium the particulate matter count was several times the international standard. Imagine, this was so inside a hospital building.

While air pollution affects citizens across economic strata, it was hardly a political issue in just concluded Assembly elections not even for the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) whose leader Arvind Kejriwal appears to be a test case of morbidity caused by air pollution. Ironically, the promise of free Wi-Fi became a poll issue and must have won AAP votes, but air pollution was missing from public discourse. Clean air is of little consequence for AAP even after the victory, as reflected in its latest decision to disregard environmental norms for small and medium enterprises (SME).

The central government - and the ministry of environment, forests and climate change - too is only paying lip service when it comes to ensuring clean air to citizens. The ministry even tried to downplay automobile exhaust as a source of air pollution, in an affidavit filed in the Supreme Court last month.

First and foremost, we don't know how bad the air in Delhi is. This is because there is multiplicity of agencies each one following its own trajectory. You have the Central Pollution Control Board, the Delhi Pollution Control Committee (DPCC), the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD), System of Air quality and weather Forecasting And Research (SAFAR). One can include the US Embassy in Delhi to this list as the embassy too tracks air pollution and its data appears to be so good that even mainstream newspapers quote it every day. Ideally, DPCC should be tracking air pollution in the city and letting citizens know the figures on a daily basis. But its monitoring system is patchy, inadequate and most of the times not operational.

SAFAR, which was actually set up for online air quality monitoring during the Commonwealth Games in 2010, is monitoring air quality (eight parameters) through ten stations in the city. The information can be accessed by people through a mobile app launched this week. Beside air quality information, health advisories for different regions of the city would also be available. The air quality can vary from place to place and time of the day/night. Data released by CSE in December 2014 had shown that air quality was pretty bad in the morning hours when people exercise and go for walks and that too in green areas like Jahapanah Park, Lodi Gardens and Lutyens' Delhi.

Once we figure out who is responsible for monitoring air in Delhi - DPCC, SAFAR, IMD, Central Pollution Control Board or anyone else - we need to have city-wide robust monitoring system in place. The data should be made available to the public in usable form - not in charts and numbers but colour-coded advisories. Along with it, concerned agencies should gather evidence on the quantum of pollution from different sources.

Meanwhile, ground should be prepared for tough measures like tighter pollution norms, restricting vehicular movement based on odd-even numbers, making parking charges prohibitive to discourage personal transport and further boost to public transport. Wi-Fi can wait.