Air Pollution: Clearing the Air

Fresh air and sunshine are the two things that never fail to cheer a despondent soul. But, of late, fresh air has been so scarce that it has created a huge scare. Anybody who was born in a time when fresh air was abundant, and ambled a mile up and down the verdant path, felt the wind blow in his face and lungs swell up with joy, distracted by a chirp there or a wood sorrel here would understand what we have lost. But it is not just pleasures of idling and ambling in the benefic Nature that are being missed. The lament is about the life giver turning foe – threatening to invade the inside of our systems with insidious intent- to strike at the source of very Life that it was supposed to support!

Diwali dealt a damaging blow to environment especially to the Air. After the lights darkness fell as a pall of fog cocooned the capital city of Delhi. Air Pollution in Delhi surged reducing visibility to 50 m .Toxic air made people and the government   hit the panic button calling for urgent and immediate action. Air-pollution saw new high levels of particulate matter finer than 2.5 mm searching to 900 mark. This was much higher than the permitted safe limit. In fact it was 15 times higher than the prescribed safety limit. It was seen as an emergency situation and immediately a set of measures were implemented included closing down of Schools for three days and shutting down Badarpur power plant for three days.

But Delhi is not alone and Lucknow followed suit. In fact all major metropolitan cities are grappling with the problem of surging air pollution .in Lucknow cheer broke out amidst winter lovers, who mistook smog but soon the cheer gave way to worry and concern for clean air is the basic right of each Indian.

 What is smog? Why is it so dangerous? How does it materialize out of the thin air? According to Wikipedia the word itself was coined in the early 20th centuries as a portmanteau of the word smoke and fog to refer to the smoky fog, it's opacity and odour. The word was intended to refer to what was sometimes known as P soup fog.  It is an air pollutant. It is a cloud causing low visibility and for it to qualify as smog there should be enough pollution, smoke and moisture in the air. This kind of visible air-pollution is composed of nitrogen oxide, sulphur oxides, ozone, smoke or particulates among other things. Human made smog is derived from road emissions, forest and agriculture fires and photochemical reactions of these emissions. The smoke and other particulate matter combine with fog when there is high humidity and low temperatures to form smog.

Though modern smog as found in los Angeles according to Wikipedia is a type of air pollutant derived from vehicular emissions from internal combustion engine is an industrial fumes that react in atmosphere with sunlight to form secondary pollutants that also combine with the primary emission to form petrochemical smog. But Delhi's problems are further complicated and aggravated by the burning of stubble in the neighbouring areas.

Smog has serious impact on human health, but ground-level ozone, sulphur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide are especially harmful for senior citizens, children and people with heart and lung ailments such as emphysema, asthma, and bronchitis. It can inflame breathing passages, choke lungs, causing shortness of breath, pain on inhaling deeply, wheezing and coughing. Nose and eyes irritation can be caused leading to the drying out of the protective membranes of the nose and throat and even interfere with body’s ability to fight infection, increasing susceptibility to illness, rendering us vulnerable to death. What would be the harmful effects of prolonged, early life exposure to smog as air-pollution needs to be studied to arrive at any estimation of long-term damage to human health and impending death.

Wisdom lies in learning from others’ mistakes. China too had faced such apocalyptic air pollution just before Beijing Olympics.

 And again in 2015. There are lessons that we can learn from China’s approach to the problem.  Treating it as an emergency, it declared war on it. Smog  is the enemy. Particulate matter that was spewed from countless cars, power stations and steel plants. It shut down its schools, factories and construction sites and stopped half of its cars from plying on the roads. These measures helped in improving the quality of the air. But the gains were temporary and the measures ad-hock.

Dr. Jim Zang, professor of global environmental health at Duke University writes "we have particles that have a diameter smaller than a virus, human hair is very big compared to these. The larger ones will be deposited into the lungs – that's the biggest worry. But recent scientific evidence shows that when the particles are small enough they go into the bloodstream as well and they can go directly into the brain too ". In this study he found that even with temporary intervention the resultant improvement in air Quality percolated to the healthy young adults having a positive bearing on their cardiovascular and respiratory health indicators. Economic slowdown complicates the issue of environmental protection men home, and economist at the Harvard university China projects establishes relationship between economic slowdown and a negative bearing on air-pollution control. "It is a complicating efforts to continue to convince people to put in costly pollution equipment and to think about energy-saving technologies

India too has woken up to the threat of menacingly high levels of air pollution in its cities. Though it has not yet dealt a silver bullet to rescue the cities but red alerts have been raised. Last year Delhi mobilized its resources to implement Odd-Even formula to keep half its vehicles off roads in the month of January. This year too schools were closed, power house shut down, public transport buses running on fossil fuel being replaced by battery operated ones, extension of Metro services, ban on stubble burning, and recently a ban on manufacturing and storage of fire crackers.  Though the benefits reaped are only temporary and defy any long term consolidation yet the red alert is a positive step and is a sign of progress in governments understanding of how they should react and respond to these extreme conditions of threat to environment. Extreme situations demand extreme remedies. All stake holders have to cooperate in the implementation of well thrashed out, long term policies for the curtailment of surging air pollution seeing its impact on Human health as well as the health of our planet.

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