 Hello and welcome to NewsClick, talking about air pollution across India, especially in its metro cities has become something like a ritual, especially when winter comes around. The air pollution levels cross higher and ever-increasing thresholds every few months and every year. By all accounts, the wintertime, all of pollutants that covers most of North India reflects how serious this problem is. But air pollution is really not an NCR problem or a problem of Mumbai, Chennai or Polkata alone to discuss this issue and some possible solutions. We have with us the Raghu Nandan of the Italy Science Forum and the All India People Science Network. Raghu, let me begin by asking you, pollution in Delhi and Mumbai has been the focus of our attention for quite some time now. But what are the sources of pollution in these cities? Is it as the media says, the burning of stubble in the North and is it the winter air, if it is the winter air and if it is the burning of crop stubble, then what explains the pollution in Bombay or elsewhere? So like you said, this problem has become a ritual and I think discussions of it are also becoming a ritual because the same problems come up every time and you get the media and the newspapers all discussing it. Let me therefore spell out two or three I think basic things which we must keep clear. One is that winter stubble burning, these are periodic events, it's like seasonal. So winter is going to come every year and stubble burning takes place in the months of December, every year. So pollution spikes. And this is true of the entire North Indian belt, the Indo-Gangetic belt if you like, which sees winter, which has cold weather conditions during which you get what is called an atmospheric inversion. That is hot air does not rise, there is a boundary layer of air on top. So everything from the surface goes up to the boundary layer and stays there. So the pollutants have nowhere else to go except to hang around there. And there is a floor level of pollution. The question you asked, why does Mumbai have pollution, etc. That's because in all Indian cities, there is a floor level of pollution, whether it's winter, whether there is crop burning or not. There is a minimum level of pollution, which is always there. Then you get added features, winter inversion in the North, crop burning in the North, etc. Mumbai, Chennai are actually helped to lower their pollution because both these are coastal cities and they have sea breezes coming to clear it. Typically in the North Indian winter, you may not have breezes at all, which is another factor for keeping it. So coming back to what I was saying, there is a floor level of pollution. And that is I think what we should be discussing. There have been many discussions by governments, by central government, by the state government, they appoint this IIT and that consultant for source apportioning, what are the different sources, how much comes from what, etc. All said and done, when all these data are put together, winter variations, summer variations, what have you, the basic floor level of pollution comes from vehicles and from dust, from construction, etc., which is also related to vehicular pollution because vehicles driving on the road throw up the dust, which then floats in the air. So in effect bulk of the pollution comes from vehicles exhausts and from dust due to construction and due to the dust being thrown up by vehicles. All the other pollutants, industrial pollutants you will have in some cities in Kanpur or Lucknow or so, Delhi doesn't have any. We have no coal-based power plants, we have no industries spewing anything here. And in winter in the North Indian plains you will have some pollution due to anguities and chulas and coal-burning stoves, which would be a few percent, eight percent, nine percent of pollution. So essentially what you're dealing with is vehicular pollution and dust. This is the reality because in the summer months when there is no inversion, there's no stubble-burning, you will still find a stable level of pollution which rarely goes below 300 or 250 AQI and that is really the problem. If you have a 250 AQI throughout the year and then it spikes to 400 or 450 in adverse conditions of winter, stubble-burning etc., so we have to deal with that floor level of 250 and that is vehicular. So, Raghun, what you're saying is that there is actually a mix of factors which would mean that we need an equal sort of mix of solutions. I mean, what we see the government say in Delhi do because we happen to be here, is that they're spraying water, they have these anti-smoke guns and they have vehicles which claim to settle the particulate matter in, these are the ways in which we see the government actually tackle this problem. Let me ask you, if these are not helped or to put it in a different way, what are the solutions that governments, our local bodies are not talking about? Yeah, so let me start from where you made your comment about mix of solutions. I think that is one of the major problems one is dealing with which is people think there are a mix of problems and therefore there has to be a mix of solutions. What I just said in fact was you have a mix of problems which makes pollution worse but you have a base level of problem which is due to vehicular pollution. So, if you tackle vehicular pollution which causes AQI to go up to 250 or 280 at normal times and you bring that down to 100, let's say then on top of that even if you add stubble burning and winter it won't go above 200 or 225. So, I think the real focus should be let's get to the root of the problem. Let's tackle the base level of pollution which is vehicles and then the other add-ons we can always tackle later but I think it is the base level of pollution that needs to be brought down. You probably are aware that there is a clean air act in our country which has a target of bringing down the base level of pollution to AQI of 100. We are nowhere near that. So, let's keep that uppermost as the target, tackle vehicular pollution. Now, what are those means to tackle vehicular pollution that needs to be looked at the chulas and the tendours and the straw burning in Punjab are episodic. They last for two weeks here and three, two months there but let's get to the root of the problem. So, Raghun, but I'm sensing also that when you solve the problem and you set about trying to solve the problem of vehicular pollution then it's not, is it going to be mass transportation, public transportation because in the NCR, I think we are at the third or a fourth of the number of buses alone that we need. So, is that the only solution? Are there few solutions that need to be also talked about? Yeah, there are two or three factors here, the most important of which you just touched on which is we need to have a very hard shift from personal vehicles to mass transportation. The Delhi metropolitan area has a population of about 20 million people and we have 13. something million vehicles on the road. No city which has got 13 million vehicles on the road is going to have low pollution levels. It's just not possible. That is one factor. The second factor is with where the government has taken some measures is to phase out older vehicles which will have higher pollution levels than newer vehicles and we also have due to our economic income distribution in India many more two-wheelers on the road than we have four-wheelers and more two-wheelers you have the higher will be the pollution level. So, we need to get the two-wheeler owners to leave their two-wheelers at home, travel by bus or metro. We need the car owners to leave their cars at home or at the nearest metro station and travel the rest of the distance by metro. So, we really need a huge shift. You also mentioned the necessity for buses. The target is that we need about 10 to 12,000 buses minimum in Delhi. We are struggling to run 3,000 to 3,500 buses at any given point of time in the city. So, we need far more public transport infrastructure than we have at present. Rako, also you need affordable public transport. Now, the Delhi metro is an absolutely fantastic route around in the city but we've never seen the prices of traveling on that go down and we see that you have, for example, where I live it isn't the NCR but you have these giant auto rickshaws which carry 15 or 10 at a time and which the various reports say they're actually heavily polluting. So, one of the last while problem is that essential and the pricing of public transport. Should it be free? You see, pricing is a public policy issue. If you look at it purely from a viability point of view that metro rail should run and be viable by itself, the DTC buses should run and should be viable by itself then you will never get an equitable solution to this problem. The government gives subsidies on many things across the country. Public transport needs to be subsidized. It cannot be expected to be fully economically viable and people still will travel by public transport because they can't afford it. If you look at working class areas in the city, you will find public workers walking on the roads because they can't even afford the buses, forget about the metro. So, public transport needs to be subsidized. One should not feel shy about doing it. Government should not hide behind this viability argument to do it. To make it more viable, government should give subsidies. There are many European cities today which work for pollution reasons and for productivity of the city reasons have made public transportation free because they believe that by giving that subsidy, getting people to travel around the city in efficient public transport without having to worry about the money actually saves the city money by increasing human productivity and work effectiveness and getting to work on time. People are encouraged to actually go to work. Exactly. To go to work and go by public transport and go by convenient transport. This is the trend in Europe today where both pollution and productivity are seen as being linked and where state expenditure on these things is seen as being helpful to the economy. That's very, very interesting that productivity argument that you just spoke about. Now, what is happening in India is that whenever there's a spike in pollution, we actually have children told that well, your schools are shut, you don't have to go to school, they're losing out on, I don't know, 10 days of schooling. I'm sure there are many offices which are concerned about the health of their employees and they say they work from home but then your homes, your indoor air pollution is not a small matter either. So then you're buying products to keep the pollution out if you can afford it. So the consequences are not just at the health level but long-term effects of losing out on the school. Absolutely. And then there are thousands of people who can afford these devices at home. These devices are no solutions. They are putting on the individual the problem which should be tackled by the state. The state is unable to provide clean drinking water. So every house has an aqua guard or a filter. The state is not able to assure you of clean air. So you are asked to have an air purifier in the house. These devices can only be owned by people who have the money. The have-nots of our country cannot afford to buy these products. So they have to live with dirty water, they have to live with the polluted air and the health costs of air pollution are enormous. They are very little spoken about. Again, the richer people can go to the hospital and so on but even the rich are not free of lung ailments or asthma or whatever it is they may be able to pay for the treatment but they suffer from the ailment no less. And this is becoming a major problem and this is another reason why in more developed countries government is prepared to spend money because if they don't on the other hand government has to bear expenditure for health care in one way or the other. So again economically it makes sense to tackle the air pollution rather than have health risks which you have to pay for through other means tomorrow. Air pollution in particular, we grow alive to it when we see the particulate matter suspended in this dense fog like substance outside our windows in the morning but that's actually not air pollution. Air pollution is also invisible and it's always around. So let's talk about how to aggressively encourage people to use public transport. What can the government do? Can it force us to not take our cars out? See there are two ways of doing it. One is to address the supply side. If you don't provide the public transport then people don't have the option. If I need to go from A to B and there is no bus to take me from A to B or taking a bus takes me two hours or even if I go by metro it takes me an hour and a half leaves me at some place from where I have to take another auto and spend 30-40 rupees more to reach the end spot then I will say I'd rather take my motorbike and reach my destination. So you need to have an effective public transport which covers the city and which provides last mile links whether that last mile is by E-Rickshaw or by any other means is depending on local circumstance. So that is one side that is the supply side of it. The other side is the demand side where people feel a discouragement to use personal transport. So for example if road tax is increased or if car prices were higher then it's a disincentive for people to own a car or if parking fees were higher then that also has to be kept in mind for the person who drives his car to the metro station and if he's going to be charged 100 rupees for the parking then he will rather take an E-Rickshaw and reach the metro station and then take his car and this is not a utopian idea one of the most developed cities in East Asia is Singapore and Singapore has extremely stringent policies towards private transport. Vehicles cost even one brand new vehicle in Singapore which imports a large number of vehicles they impose a huge amount of duty on those vehicles so that you are discouraged from buying a car and if you want to own a second car then the prices are made prohibitive you have to pay 150 percent more than you paid for the first car you have to prove that you have a parking space inside your house so even the upper middle class in Singapore travel by public transport because the transport is available they can reach where they want conveniently and the city government has made sure that driving a personal vehicle is made shall we say prohibitively expensive so you would rather leave your car at home than incur the expense of taking it out so you need to control both the supply side as well as the demand side of the you should encourage the demand by raising the cost of personal transport and you should encourage public transport by increasing the quality and quantity of public transportation which is available. Raghu let's also spend a little time at least on you know the various measures which we see around us and also the problem outside the metros you know Muzaffar Nagar city in western UP has repeatedly come up as one of the most polluted cities in the world the hundred most polluted that's a little puzzling that's surely is it is it driven by the same factors as you find in Delhi or Bombay. It is driven by the same factors with one additional factor which is that the anti pollution drives in the metropolitan cities of Bombay and Delhi even Calcutta to some extent have driven the factories out from the metros into the periphery so the metros have fewer factories but all the polluting factories where will they go? They go outside of Delhi which means they go to places like Muzaffar Nagar, Mirat etc in the NCR region they go somewhere if they are shut from here the same thing happened in Mumbai when the textile factories closed down the same thing happened in Delhi when the entire DCM mills area shut down and the factories went out so this is only decentralizing the problem of pollution by taking it away from the metros and taking it into the satellite townships around the metropolitan cities so the problem remains the same. It's only dispersing the pollution far and wide rather than solving the problem where it was. And yet stubble burning is the cause of concern right because you know let's talk finally about all those other you know relatively smaller factors and dealing with destruction dust comes to mind diesel fumes comes to mind and also these stubble burning. So let's deal with these one by one I'll take diesel first. Delhi has taken several measures to discourage diesel some of these are market driven in the sense that diesel prices have been allowed to rise whereas earlier they were subsidized in the belief that transportation would be eased and therefore essential prices of commodities etc would come down. Now diesel prices are fairly close to petrol prices so the earlier factor for a personal vehicle owner was he liked having a big SUV which ran on diesel and made him feel macho and big inside the car even though it was highly polluting etc because the diesel was half the cost of petrol. Today when diesel and petrol costs are not that much different then so the number of diesel vehicles in Delhi for example has gone down drastically earlier it was close to 50% of vehicles in Delhi now it's down to less than 20% and that figure is going to go down soon you'll get policies which will virtually discourage all diesel vehicles. We don't have diesel buses anymore although Chennai city for example has a fairly extensive public transport system entirely diesel buses that's the cause of pollution over there so we need to cut down on diesel and there are various arguments and ways of doing that but let's come to the stubble burning issue it seems to be a problem which defies solution somebody the Delhi government said they've got IARI which has made a solution which will dissolve the stubble leftover and put it into the soil the problem with that is the solution takes about four weeks to work to really degrade the stubble and get it back into the soil the time the farmer has between the end of the wheat and the planting of the paddy crop for the winter is two weeks everything has to be done in two weeks yes so if he's not able to cut the crop and move it out from his field he has nothing else to do except to set it on fire now the government has been trying all kinds of things state government central government by providing machinery now frankly you cannot provide a machine to each farmer a machine which will cut the stubble or a machine which will plow the machine the stubble back into the soil this has to be done collectively so this has to be provided to the grand panchayat or to a farmer's cooperative or a farmer producer organization some such institution which will arrange for distribution of these machines in a timely fashion between the farmers of the village that is one second is once you cut the stubble what do you do with it it'll cost the farmer money so government has started giving the farmer some money farmers say that's not enough say 10,000 rupees an acre the farmer gets to clear the stubble but he's cleared the stubble then what does he do with it so there are one or two factories which have come up which say we will use the stubble to make cardboard to make fiberboards or now to make alcohol ethanol so on and so forth but you need to establish a supply chain from the farm to the factory who is going to take the stubble from the farm to the factory that's another question the factory owner says let the government arrange for it let the farmer bring it to my door I will do it this has to be done in an effective way if necessary the government has to step in as an initial thing saying we will take the responsibility again like I said through a grand panchayat through farmers cooperatives they can gather the straw in one place then a state agency can pick this and dump it at the factory a gate somewhere so you solve the supply chain problem of taking the straw from the farmer's field to whichever factory is going to use that government is also already giving reasonably good subsidies for these factories to use the stubble so I think economically that will work but they need to arrange the supply chain and not depend on so-called market forces we might send because that won't happen so that needs to be fixed if you fix that I think the problem can be solved right Raghu the final thing just a quick thing also on the construction dust yes yes yeah so construction dust is a major factor and unfortunately in a place like Delhi especially which is still a growing city you have construction going all over the place and you have dust everywhere there are two possible answers to this one is which they have tried to some extent is all activities which require the dust particularly mixing of concrete you have dust suppression activities you sprinkle the whole area with water and so on and settle the dust down and then you bring the mixed concrete into the city and not actually do these activities in every house where you'll have a pile of dust in front of your house where the wind blows the thing okay now some people put a blue tarpaulin or plastic sheet on top which is torn things so it's hardly any protection anyway so you definitely need to control that mostly by prefabricated or pre-processing of concrete outside the city and then bringing the mixed concrete or prefabricated structures into the city that's one secondly the entire road dust phenomenon is highly mishandled in most cities particularly in Delhi in most cities if you lived elsewhere in Bombay or Bangalore your street cleaners will come out at 6 30 in the morning to clean the streets in Delhi the street cleaning starts at 9 o'clock in the morning some guy has come down the road he's cleaned all the cars and washed them and then the street cleaner comes and kicks up all the dust and it again get deposited on the car and gets carried away so you need to do an overnight sprinkling of water you can use recycled sewage water for that purpose so you're not wasting treated water sprinkle the city at night so that the dust settles down on the road and you can repeat this maybe once or twice during the day of course it's difficult on trunk roads where you've got heavy traffic which is why they now go with these so-called smog guns and try and do it down they are basically sprinklers which you do but I think a lot of this should be done overnight so that the dust settles down below stays wet so that the morning traffic does not kick up the dust as much as it does now and by the way most pollutants levels in India if you look at the AQI in Delhi is higher at night than it is in the daytime so the night time is the most effective time to do the sprinkling and settle the dust down that's one and of course the more construction sites you have all over the place trucks carrying sand and thing up and down you will get more and more dust everywhere in the city which will then get thrown up by the trucks and the cars and so on one is to keep the dust outside the city as much as possible the sand etc etc second is to do effective sprinkling of the streets and so on to do it and the third step in which funnily enough Delhi is slightly better than other metros the more tree plantation you do alongside roads the more dust will get captured by the tree and not allowed to fall on the streets and then get thrown up which is true of the polluting aerosols as well so tree plantation is the third step that is can be taken to suppress dust. Right Raghu thanks very much for joining us and thanks for answering some of these questions for us and thank you very much to our viewers for watching this news click video see you again later hopefully when it's cleaner and the cleanliness looks like it's going to last thanks again