JOIN USWhen death lurks in the air and water: Laws not enforced; Public health in peril
Four years ago, when Madhusudan Anand moved to Bengaluru from Hyderabad with his family, he looked forward to a new life in the city where he grew up. Unfortunately, within weeks he started visiting clinics as his six-month-old son developed breathing troubles. One of the doctors suggested checking the quality of air the baby was breathing, even though the Garden City’s air pollution data wasn’t alarming. That’s when Madhusudan decided to install pollution-measuring gadgets near his house.
The results were startling. While Bengaluru’s average PM-2.5 count was 40 micrograms per cubic metre, on a particular day, the meters at his home (located 13 km away from the closest instrument) recorded a PM-2.5 figure of 800, suggesting what could be the root cause of his newborn’s ailing health.
Madhusudan’s case is not an isolated one. Lakhs of Indians silently suffer from toxic air and water. According to a 2018 World Health Organisation report, more than a lakh children below the age of five are killed by air pollution, making ours the worst nation in the world to breathe in.
One in 10 deaths in children under the age of five is due to air pollution, which also takes away two years of life from an adult Indian citizen. Overall, nearly 18 lakh Indians perish daily.
Particularly vulnerable are children under five years of age, pregnant women, elderly, and those affected by other diseases. Short-term high-level exposure to bad-quality air — experienced by the residents of Delhi and its satellite towns during winter when the national-capital region turns into a ‘gas chamber’— results in eye, nose and throat irritation, and coughing, wheezing, chest discomfort and acute upper-respiratory-tract infections.
Add water pollution to the mix and you will find a situation in which the two essential ingredients of life turn deadly for lakhs with the government doing little to clean them up.
S Venkatesh, former director-general of health services in the Union Health Ministry believes, “air pollution is an invisible insidious problem.”
“The impact depends on the level of pollution, exposure duration and an individual’s vulnerability,” he said.
Since polluting particles trigger inflammation, the vulnerable individuals experience lower-respiratory-tract infection and inflammation, asthma, bronchitis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, ischaemic heart disease, and cerebrovascular stroke.
Long-term exposure can result in chronic illness of respiratory and cardiovascular systems, lung cancer and premature death. Studies now show links between pollution and other health problems.
Last year, for instance, Vijay Vishwanathan, an endocrinologist at MV Hospital for Diabetes in Chennai, showed a link between PM-2.5 and diabetes based on a study on 400 people. This month, the Barcelona Institute for Global Health published a study demonstrating the association between exposure to air pollution and poor bone health in over 3,700 people from 28 villages near Hyderabad.
Anoop Misra, a former professor of medicine at All India Institute of Medical Sciences explains: “In China, there are many robust studies showing how pollution impacts non-communicable diseases. The Indian evidence has begun to emerge.”
The water story is a little different. While there is an improvement in people’s access to clean drinking water and piped water in the last two decades, the conditions of rivers and lakes are turning from bad to worse. To compound the problem, unplanned urbanisation has led to the closure of many tanks and ponds that dotted the landscape a decade or two ago.
Since 1985, there have been government programmes to improve the quality of rivers and lakes on which thousands of crores were spent. But the rivers continue to be plagued by high levels of organic pollution, low level of oxygen available for aquatic organisms and bacteria, and protozoa and viruses that have faecal-origin and cause illness. Most lakes in India are under threat from nutrient overload, which causes their eutrophication and eventual choking from the weeds proliferating in the nutrient-rich water.
In 2017, when Maharashtra Pollution Control Board analysed water quality along the Mumbai coast, it found untreated sewage and water flowing into the Mumbai rivers and creeks, polluting the Arabian sea. For Mithi river, the water quality index was 28 (WQI between 63-100 indicates clean water), which means oxygen supply in water was too low for the marine life to thrive. Over the years, fishermen have reported that opportunities to catch fish have reduced along the Mumbai coast.
Interestingly, there is no shortage of laws to check the rot. The Water (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act of 1974 was the first national law on pollution control. Seven years later came the Air (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act of 1981. On the plus side, the two legislation led to the creation of pollution control boards, but they failed to stop green crimes.
“In either of the law, the deterrence is not credible. While the punishment needs to be swift and proportionate, the punishment for not meeting the standards by 10% or by 1000 times is the same,” explained green activist Chandra Bhushan, the chief executive officer of iFOREST, an independent environmental research and advocacy outfit.
“The law empowers pollution control boards. But these agencies are still not in the reach of the general public. Complaints regarding a lot of pollution-related issues such as water contamination and poor air quality can’t be taken to the police stations. This is a major setback as the short-staffed board (in Tamil Nadu) is not keen on solving pollution-related issues,” said a retired Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board official.
In the larger Mumbai Metropolitan Region that comprises Thane, Raigad and Palghar besides the western metropolis, the nitrogen oxide levels are high and PM-10 level had increased by 64% in the last decade. “There are multiple laws but they are far from being implemented in letter and spirit,” said activist Sumaira Abdulali of Aawaz Foundation, that works on issues relating to environment.
Green regulations are created on the basis of polluter-pays principle, which means after the polluter pays fine for the crime, it is assumed that he won’t pollute again.
“This does not happen in India in the absence of a suitable administrative body. As a result, the polluter happily pays the fine (which is not much) and continues to pollute,” noted Manoj Mishra of Yamuna Jiye Abhiyan. “The existing Air Act doesn’t empower the Central Pollution Control Board with adequate authority and administrative support to clean the air. Its preamble does not even link air pollution with public health. A new law is required to deal with such environmental emergency,” said Congress Lok Sabha MP Gaurav Gogoi, who is set to move a private member bill on air pollution in the next session of the Parliament.
Within days of coming to power in 2014, Narendra Modi-led government formed a high-level committee under the chairmanship of former Cabinet Secretary T S R Subramanian to review half-a-dozen green laws including the water and air Acts. The panel recommended many changes in the legal system, but a few months later a Parliamentary panel rejected the Subramanian report. Since then, there has not been much progress in changing such laws. As the death and disability count goes up, the government now tries hard to dodge the bullet in the court and questions the credibility of the research. “Over the years, politicians diluted the intent behind these acts. Now it is a tall order,” summed up Mishra.
(With inputs from Sivapriyan E T B
and Mrityunjay Bose)