Unlike in the case of Covid, there is no vaccine to inoculate us against poor AQI.
Dec 2, 2024 11:45 IST First published on: Dec 2, 2024 at 04:45 IST
I don’t think we can solve our environmental problem in a hurry. Every politician can promise jobs, money in schemes, national prestige, global power, and great infrastructure. But it will take quite a while before a politician will get up on stage and say vote for me because this is my plan to clean your air and rivers, beautify parks for your children to play in and your parents to walk in, and ensure that the sky above you is blue. Because, let’s be honest, we wouldn’t believe that neta.
This is because, in the market society we live in, we are used to buying our way to better things. We know this works: Pay a higher fee, get a better school; pay more, get a hospital with an air-conditioned waiting room and a shorter queue; pay for Vande Bharat, escape the three-tier sleeper coach with unclean toilets at either end.
So, we will seal our apartments from the outside world with double-plated glass windows. Buy an air purifier for each room; switch on the one in the car. Get the government to announce a work-from-home system and let our children study from home. Ban construction, lock away old cars, buy EVs, or order a cab. After all, we have the pandemic model, so we can create our non-polluting bubbles and live inside them. But, just like the virus, the air has a sneaky habit of entering through cracks in our windows, through the pores of the masks we wear. If we aren’t able to fly away to Goa or Bangalore, picking our destination on the basis of its AQI, we will need to live with this. And we will use our credit cards to find a solution.
There’s one little problem.
Unlike in the case of Covid, there is no vaccine to inoculate us against poor AQI. Even our Rs 25-crore apartments in Gurgaon, unless we seal them up like an ICU, will let the air in. Of course, those who work for us will commute to our homes, and cough and fall ill, unless we agree to let them live with us in these sealed chambers.
The poor suffer more. Pollution is not the great leveller many think it is. We blame everyone for this mess except ourselves — usually those who are lower down in the social and economic pyramid than us.
We blame the farmers. Of course, stubble burning pollutes the air. But year after year, we hear the same arguments and name-calling rather than a concerted national action plan to support them in ending this practice. Construction churns out dust so we say ban it, not knowing that in an economy like ours, this means hardship for the millions of daily-wage workers who make their living at these sites. Burning of garbage, two-wheelers and coal-fired chulhas are all behind the toxic air and are all indispensable elements of daily life for many. We don’t think twice before welcoming work from home and study from home, ignorant of what this means for the majority who don’t have reliable wifi at home, whose children will fall behind on the learning curve, who may lose their job if they don’t show up at their employer’s door.
What is the way forward? We need a national plan that touches each of us and that requires each of us to make a sacrifice. The poor and the marginalised need to be incentivised with material resources, not punished. This is exactly what we argue at every COP, when the developed nations lecture us, saying “don’t do this, don’t do that”. And just as we argue, with reason and moral power, that the Global South should not be made to pay for the greed of the North and told to arrest its own development plans, we need to do the same here. We cannot have an action plan that does not take into account the inequality in our society — as if a person with an SUV and central air conditioning makes the “same sacrifice” as their driver or domestic help. As if everyone has the same history and the same access to resources — the same ability to withdraw into a bubble.
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The Global South is our local neighbourhood: It is the farmer, the daily-wage worker, the child in a government school, the first-generation college student, the young person looking for a job and the domestic help cycling to our apartment complexes each day. It is those who can’t afford inhalers and masks, and all those who work to make our lives better. They may not breathe the filtered air, they don’t have the many masks that we can buy off any shelf. The only thing they have is the same right to life, right to dignity, right to equality as per the Constitution. This calls for a governance of compassion and a governance of ethics.
As we celebrate the 75th year of the Constitution, all we can do is take a deep breath and hope for change.
The writer is the author of Being Good, Aaiye, Insaan Banen and Ethikos. He teaches and trains courses on ethics, values and behaviour
