JOIN USTackling pollution is a must-do, not a choice
According to the World Health Organisation, nine of the 10 most-polluted cities are in India. The status in rural areas is not any better as homes are sites of air pollution due to poor ventilation. Furthermore, surface and groundwater sources, and also the soil in many places are extensively contaminated, especially due to pesticide and fertiliser pollution. As Lancet reported earlier, India contributes around a million of the seven million deaths caused by pollution globally. These facts should remind us that the adverse impacts of pollution are deep and widespread and their impact on health can be bio-accumulative and inter-generational.
In a country where the Right to a Clean Environment is intricately interwoven into the Fundamental Right to Life, such extensive adverse health impacts from pollution should have forced public health and environmental regulatory agencies out of their stupor. Instead, prevailing laissez-faireism in assessing environmental, health and social impacts of development projects has been energised.
Also Read: When death lurks in the air and water
In fact, the first major reform initiative of Prime Minister Modi was to train, and if necessary dilute, environmental, public health and forest protection laws and regulations to become business-friendly. This was achieved by the 2014 T S R Subramanian Committee recommendations which promoted the ‘principle of utmost good faith’ in investors and industrialists to report honestly on the impacts of their activities.
If the increasingly large proportion of environmental cases as part of Public Interest Litigations is anything to go by, it can be safely assumed that industrialists and infrastructure developers and regulatory agencies are not coming clean on the true extent of pollution in India. The causes are not limited to the usual suspects such as urbanisation and infrastructure development, but also to chemical residues from agriculture. The wanton disposal of waste, domestic and industrial, is adding to this burden. For waste is no more composed of organic matter on which pathogens thrive, but is increasingly loaded with a range of toxic and carcinogenic chemicals, and also radioactive waste.
Despite the 1974 Water Pollution Control and Prevention Act, and a similar one to tackle air pollution in 1981, which were followed by a slew of waste management rules issued under the 1986 Environment Protection Act, there is no end to the mushrooming of landfills. Analysis undertaken by Environment Support Group over decades at the Mavallipura landfills, north of Bengaluru, reveals that the leachates, the soil and surface and groundwater aquifers (even in 1,000-feet borewells) in the impacted villages are contaminated by a spectrum of toxic chemicals, which include heavy metals. While the stench due to putrefying organic matter is unbearable, the air is also laden with high concentrations of toxic chemicals released when plastics, batteries, electronic waste, biomedical waste, etc., are all dumped and deliberately set on fire or catch fire due to methane buildup.
Interventions to tackle pollution, sponsored by governments, corporates, and a range of philanthropists, largely rely on technocratic responses instead. This is evident in several efforts to tackle air pollution, as the emphasis is on measuring air quality and promoting end-of-pipe solutions. Such an approach has been adopted in tackling industrial and urban effluent discharges over decades and has only resulted in extensive pollution of rivers, streams, wells, groundwater and also coastal stretches of India. Besides, the systemically flawed ‘management’ approach to tackling water pollution is now afflicting efforts for tackling air pollution as well. ‘Monitoring’ air quality has been turned into a major investment opportunity, for instance.
Multiple interventions are essential. Activities that exacerbate existing levels of pollution should be promoted highly restrictively, and under the strictest of regulations. Environmental decision-making promoting such developments needs to be transparent and publicly undertaken, and not by adopting the ‘Principle of utmost good faith’.
The author works with Environment Support Group, a non-profit engaged with environmental, social justice and governance initiatives.)