Delhi's air pollution is a classic case of environmental injustice
Many of Delhi’s cars, by contrast, continue to burn particulate-heavy diesel. Researchers have measured concentrations of hazardous ultra-fine particles on the city’s arterial roads that are eight times higher than those recorded on rooftop monitors just a kilometre away.
The health impacts on residents are becoming more and more evident. Children’s developing bodies are especially susceptible to long-term harm. A 2008 study for India’s Central Pollution Control Board reported that more than two-fifths of Delhi’s schoolchildren have reduced lung function, damage that is likely to be irreversible.
The good news is that there is rising demand from India’s citizens for cleaner air, coupled with greater willingness of Delhi’s populist Aam Aadmi (roughly translated as common man) government, elected a year ago, to respond. Delhi needs ambitious, longer-term policies to tackle root causes of the problem. These must include not only steps to halt the exponential growth in car traffic and diesel trucks but also huge new investments in public transportation, tougher pollution controls on the smoke-belching power plants and brick kilns that ring the capital’s perimeter, and measures to reduce the clouds of dust from construction debris and road traffic.
Beneath the headlines, Delhi’s air pollution is not only a public health disaster; it is a classic case of environmental injustice. The city’s affluent classes reap the lion’s share of the benefits from the activities that poison the air, while less privileged residents bear most of the human health costs. This fateful disjuncture – and the inequalities of wealth and power that lie behind it – has posed the single biggest impediment to addressing the problem.
It remains to be seen whether the authorities in Delhi can muster the political will to go beyond stopgap emergency measures and launch the policies that are desperately needed to safeguard the public interest in a clean environment against the private interests of the polluting classes. Will India, often hailed as the world’s largest democracy, be able to overcome the oligarchy that rules its air? The poor who bear the heaviest air pollution burdens wish they could hold their breath long enough to find out.