What PM Modi can take from Japan's clear blue sky and clean air
Too much has happened this week. Changes that will alter life as we know it in the world, India and Delhi.
I started by writing about the air we breathe as the smog turned Delhi into a gas chamber, then Prime Minister Modi waved his omnipotent wand and poof — turned 500 and 1,000 rupee notes into dust, and then the Donald gave his victory speech to a speechless world.
So, before the moon falls out of the sky, I’m determined to get this piece to the printers by going back to my original plan because, even if two of the largest democracies have gone white this week, the air you breathe in Delhi is still black.
Hot on the heels of his black into white money master stroke, PM Modi has arrived here in Japan. On the agenda will be civil nuclear deals, trade, investment and high speed trains, but I do hope while he’s flitting between meetings he looks up at the sky and is shocked to find it’s actually blue.
When my daughter landed in Delhi, the first thing she asked as we made our way out was, "Mama, where’s the sky?."
This was back in June and I shushed her, annoyed at her behaving like such a foreigner. Now I’m just thankful we live in a city that has a sky and it’s blue like nature intended it to be.
For all those who can’t and won’t get away, I hope our leader from Delhi notices that the air he breathes in Tokyo is breathable. That his lungs rejoice from the respite and that it dawns on him that there is no future in leading a nation of sick, coughing, diseased children.
I live in the centre of Tokyo and keep forgetting this is the most populated city in the world. That is the genius of this mega-metropolis which has managed to create pockets of slow, leafy, suburban village life amidst ultra modern living and towering skyscrapers.
It has one of the cleanest air of any city this size — the PM 2.5 level here is 15, while in Delhi it’s apocalyptic.
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| When my daughter landed in Delhi, the first thing she asked as we made our way out was, "Mama, where’s the sky?." (Photo: Reuters) |
In the 1960s this was a city where people wore gas masks and bought oxygen from vending machines (their love of vending machines is legendary but that’s a whole other story I will no doubt tell at some point). They were dying of painful, environmentally caused diseases, giving birth to deformed babies and living with skies and waterbodies that were black with pollution, all for the grand prize of fast and furious economic growth and greed.
Sounds familiar?
The Japanese government, business leaders and local people took stock of the situation and agreed that development without health is a no-brainer.
Strict laws were passed in 1970 and stringently implemented, tax breaks were offered for pollution-reduction measures and companies began investing in hi-tech pollution-control technologies turning it into a profitable business.
Notoriously polluted cities known as death holes, like Kawasaki, rebranded themselves as eco-cities pioneering in solar and hydro power.
I don’t mean to lecture you, I merely aim to illustrate that it’s possible.
Maybe PM Modi can have a chat with his good friend Abe-San over some vegetarian sushi about how Japan has integrated environmental and economic planning and how they simultaneously have clean air and the largest electronics goods industry or, how their skies are blue, yet are one of the biggest automobile manufacturers in the world.
#WATCH PM Narendra Modi arrives at the Kawasaki Heavy Industries with Japanese PM Shinzo Abe to get first hand info on bullet trains pic.twitter.com/Jn58n9d0WC
— ANI (@ANI_news) November 12, 2016
The biggest learning for me in this past year of living in this land of paradoxes has been that the WA (harmony of the community) supersedes everything else. Individual needs and personal desires are given little to zero importance.
I cannot say I’m a fan, but I do see how that helps in national matters like pollution.
In India we have no sense of collective welfare — not as a country, nor as a city, not even as a locality — we are all individualists. That is well and good when it comes to entrepreneurship but a huge impediment for a healthy, happy nation.
We will throw and burn our waste around the corner without a thought and please — it’s not just the low income and uneducated. The consumption and waste production of the wealthy is through the roof and just because you are not personally taking your garbage out you can no longer pretend it automatically decomposes.
Time to dig those compost pits, actively recycle, change purchasing patterns and our ridiculous lalaji lifestyle. No more driving two separate hummers and SUVs for a 100-metre trip to the corner shop.
This lack of sense for the greater good has to be rectified because we are all part of the whole when it comes to the air we breathe or the water we drink.
Why are efficiently run, highly informed, thousand crore profit making companies still dumping waste in the very waters that will be used to grow their food? Why are they waiting for a dithering government to regulate them?
Surely they are worldly enough to innovate and set environmental standards of their own. Can’t they see that it is effecting them too?
It’s like those pilots who cheated on their exams and got fake qualifications. Don’t they see they will be on those very same planes that they never got qualified to fly?
It’s an immediate suicide wish. We are no longer harming other people or future generations, it’s our own eyes that our itching, our own lungs that are collapsing and our own bowels that are revolting.
(Courtesy of Mail Today.)
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