Atmosphere of Collaboration

Air Pollution Science, Politics and Ecopreneurship in Delhi

Rohit Negi, Prerna Srigyan

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367443221
• eBook ISBN: 9781000379822
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Diseases & Allergies

This book discusses air pollution in Delhi from scientific, social and entrepreneurial perspectives. Using key debates and interventions on air pollution, it examines the trajectories of environmental politics in the Delhi region, one of the most polluted areas in the world. It highlights the administrative struggles, public advocacy, and entrepreneurial innovations that have built creative new links between science and urban citizenship. The book describes the atmosphere of collaboration that pervades these otherwise disparate spheres in contemporary Delhi.

Key features:

· Presents an original case study on urban environmentalism from the Global South

· Cuts across science, policy, advocacy and innovation

· Includes behind-the-scenes discussions, tensions and experimentations in the Indian air pollution space

· Uses immersive ethnography to study a topical and relevant urban issue

As South Asian and Global South cities confront fast-intensifying environmental risks, this study presents a dialogue between urban political ecology (UPE) and science and technology studies on Delhi's air. The book explores how the governance of air is challenged by scales, jurisdictions, and institutional structures. It also shows how technical experts are bridging disciplinary silos as they engage in advocacy by translating science for public understanding. The book serves as a reminder of the enduring struggles over space, quality of life, and citizenship while pointing to the possibilities for different urban futures being negotiated by variegated agents.

The book will interest scholars and researchers of science and technology studies, urban studies, urban geography, environmental studies, environmental politics, governance, public administration, and sociology, especially in the Global South context. It will also be useful to practitioners, policymakers, bureaucrats, government bodies, civil society organisations, and those working on air pollution advocacy.

1
Introduction

Walking towards the venue of an air pollution event, organised by the Centre for Science and Environment with the Delhi Chief Minister in attendance, I run into an expatriate ecopreneur-activist whom I had come to know in the course of research (more in Chapter 5). We enter the packed hall together. Searching in vain for empty seats, we find a perch by a slew of video cameras sent by various news channels. While the CM is a popular figure in general, interest in this event was heightened because the city was four days into the latest episode of vehicle rationing, locally known as “odd/even,” and it had already attracted controversy, with the main opposition party having criticised it heavily. As the crowd waited for the CM, I notice my companion exchange greetings with a few individuals who I recognise from other air-related events in the previous months. One of them, another ecopreneur, rises from his seat and walks towards us, gesturing towards his mobile phone. He shows us a graph—on an air quality app—with hourly trends of PM2.5 in Delhi. It had been building up since the morning, and had shot up to about 150 [microgram/cubic meter] by the afternoon. Another acquaintance, who was an advisor to the AAP¹ government as well as a fellow traveller in Delhi’s air scene, joins in the conversation. The three of them speculate on the reasons for the spike. “Maybe they’ve set fire to crops around Delhi,” says the expat, an assessment the government advisor doubts. The debate though is quickly adjourned as the CM enters the over-flowing hall in Central Delhi.²

The interest in the event we open with, and the presence of diverse voices in it, are indicative of the general salience of air pollution in Delhi’s public sphere and of its specific trajectory. Environmental advocates work closely with scientists and researchers, and many of them converse directly with the highest levels of the government. Even individuals unaffiliated to well-established organisations have entered the conversation and voice their opinions at public events (both the ecopreneurs in the earlier narrative made interventions during the ensuing discussion that evening). These individuals are, and see themselves as, “armed with data” and an understanding of its implications. They are, in other words, vectors of a splintered expertise that is now available on mobile phones, should anyone be interested. And yet, as is seen in the short exchange described earlier, even when an understanding of the technical variables is shared, there are wide divergences in explanations.

Experiences with critical pollution are, of course, not about Delhi alone. India’s economic growth story of the past three decades has been scripted by viewing and drawing on the environment as a limitless cheap resource. Economists, who disproportionately shape public policy in India, pay heed to the environmental Kuznets curve, which argues that countries pass through a phase of environmental degradation as per capita incomes rise, adopting stricter regulations and cleaner technologies only after reaching a certain threshold of economic development. As critical literature notes (Stern, 2004), global discursive shifts towards environmentalism and domestic movements have pushed India towards far more comprehensive laws and institutions for environmental protection than other countries at a similar level of development. There seems a fundamental contradiction at the heart of Indian environmental realities: large-scale degradation coexists with stringent legal regulatory regimes and a decent record of biodiversity conservation.

The Bhopal gas disaster of 1984 remains a watershed in the popular consciousness and environmental governance. The tragedy led to a worldwide awakening around chemical, industrial, and environmental risks faced by already-marginalised communities like Dalits, minorities, and the urban poor, more widely. Stringent laws and regulations, empowerment of state agencies, and right to information towards greater public knowledge of risks were, in the post-Bhopal world, considered essential to effective and just environmental governance (Fortun, 2004). One result of the emergence of this consensus was the widening gulf between environmental conditions in the North and the rest of the world. As the former cleaned up their most severely polluted urban regions, the displacement of hazardous activities elsewhere led to a reconfigured global geography of risk: countries like China, India, and Nigeria emerged as toxic hotspots (Negi, 2020). It became incumbent on these countries to set up their own infrastructures of monitoring and enforcement, a huge challenge that created a significant lag between pollution and its amelioration via regulation and restoration. Meanwhile, corporations continually push back against environmental oversight through well-funded lobbying at various levels of the sociopolitical system (Fortun et al., 2016). This includes a systematic “labour of confusion” via greenwashing campaigns and half-hearted local interventions, exacerbating affected communities’ “physical and psychological suffering” (Auyero and Swiston, 2009, p4).

It is in this context that scholars have shown the form of urbanisation taking place in India as environmentally destructive, with issues like land-cover change, air and water pollution, and piling waste that harm public health and disrupt ecology (Rademacher and Sivaramakrishnan, 2013). Dust circulates across urban regions, toxic air and water affect large populations, and landfills constantly leach into neighbouring areas to make many urban regions unliveable. It is another matter that millions have few options other than to carry on living in highly stressed zones since they allow a relatively affordable foothold in the city. A sizable urban population thus subsists while being exposed to multiple toxic matter and gases. These risks extend far into the peri-urban zones, where, additionally, residents must contend with urban detritus like the most hazardous industries while also being sparsely attended to by regulatory authorities (Priya et al., 2017).

Of the environmental risks that characterise the present moment, air pollution is perhaps the deadliest. Toxic air was estimated to account for around 7 million deaths worldwide in 2016 (WHO, 2018). The reliance on thermal energy, promotion of private mobility, explosion of the real estate sector, and the imperative to increase the quantum of agricultural production are together responsible for the highly polluted atmospheres of many urban areas. In the Delhi region,³ vehicular emissions, construction dust, garbage burning, and stubble fires from the wider region combine with peculiar geography and meteorology to produce a perfect storm such that the city witnesses only about 50 days of clean air—as per national air quality standards—annually (Rampal, 2019). Over 30 million residents of the region are forced to live with respiratory ailments, as the poison builds up inside their lungs, brain and other organs, bringing mortality ever closer. Delhi’s place as one of the world’s most polluted conurbations (Irfan, 2017) has in turn generated a vibrant public debate on the causes of and interventions to reduce air pollution. Its toxic air is, therefore, a productive vantage point to observe the environmental implications of what has been termed the “urban century,” as scientists, policymakers, journalists, activists, and laypeople continually grapple with toxicity.

In a perceptive paper on Delhi’s environmental history, Awadhendra Sharan (2006) argues that the “environment is a fluid concept, linking cultures, populations, materials and spaces in specific ways in particular historical conjunctures” (p4910). Sharan describes the shift in state action from an overarching colonial emphasis on nuisance to the attempts to reduce pollution through land-use planning, and from the inclusion of environmental concerns in planning itself, to the judicial assertion of environmental rights. In the 1990s, India’s Supreme Court initiated a slew of pollution-abatement actions that transformed Delhi’s industrial and transport landscape. After a long-drawn case, discussed in detail in Chapter 4, the court ordered the closure of hazardous industries and the conversion of all public and semi-public automobiles to compressed natural gas (CNG). These interventions led to the loss of livelihood for many workers and auto-rickshaw drivers, many of whom were migrants to the city. Delhi’s social justice movements and several scholars strongly critiqued these interventions as elitist, driven by “bourgeois environmentalism” (Baviskar, 2003; Véron, 2006), and complicit with broader attempts to reorder Delhi into a post-industrial “world-class city” to which the working classes and their spaces become superfluous (Ghertner, 2015). Indeed, following the court order, private housing complexes, shopping malls, and parks came up in plots where industries previously stood.

As affected people coped with these shifts and the air visibly cleaned up due to the interventions mentioned earlier (Guttikunda and Gurjar, 2012, p3202), interest in Delhi’s air pollution subsided in the 2000s. It was in 2014–15, with a WHO report that placed the city as the world’s most polluted capital—a fact denied by the government (Mazoomdaar, 2014)—the US President Barrack Obama’s visit to Delhi during the January 2015 smog that was projected to cost him 6 hours of his life (Pearson, 2015), and a New York Times reporter’s publicised decision to relocate from Delhi because of pollution (Harris, 2015), that the issue returned to the public eye. As pollution has worsened, the debate too has become more pronounced, especially during the winters when air is at its most toxic (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Monthly average PM2.5 (µ/m³) in Delhi between 2016 and 2018. The Indian standard is 40 and the WHO standard is 10 µ/m³ annual mean⁶

In this book, we track the conversation and interventions related to Delhi’s air since 2015. We find that three emergent aspects have assumed importance during this time. First, more than visceral responses and economic calculations,⁴ air pollution science has assumed primacy in the larger debate, framing critical questions in terms of data accessibility and availability, working with urgency for cleaner air. Second, the toxic air is now widely recognised as a multisectoral and multiscale concern requiring new styles of environmental governance, even as collectives organising for a healthier city seek inclusive means of building momentum. Third, there has been a veritable explosion in the market for commodities like air quality monitors and purifiers to make air pollution a thriving ecopreneurial space.⁵

Taking up each of these aspects in the subsequent chapters, we discuss the common threads of interdisciplinarity, experimentation, and collaboration running through the work of the numerous researchers, advocates, activists, and ecopreneurs engaging with air in and around Delhi. In other words, we see, in the contemporary air pollution problem space, an atmosphere of collaboration that invites diverse agents with variegated stakes to think and act together towards sustainable and just environmental outcomes.

The widely held belief that credible data are the prerequisite to any discussion on pollution opens the doors to monitoring technologies, dispersion models, and long-term medical studies; to a world of technosciences populated by experts representing a range of interested disciplines from atmospheric chemistry to meteorology and epidemiology to engineering. At the same time, the debate has seen a general diffusion of expertise, and environmental facts today emerge from locations outside state and academic institutions. Nearly each discipline realises the insufficiency of its particular way of knowing the problem, leading to frequent boundary crossings amongst the several air pollution sciences. Their collaborations spread far and wide, bringing in participants from locations around the world, united by the desire to know Delhi’s air better to act on it. It takes flexibility, reflexivity, and collaborations to stay relevant.

The institutional architecture through which air is governed is also in constant churning. It involves interactions between the state at many scales (central, provincial, local), multiple regulatory bodies, and different ministries with their own core subject area, but with bearing on air pollution and its consequences. All of this makes governing air a complicated and politically vibrant arena, where larger questions of environmental governance are being debated and contested. Collectives working on environmental issues, for their part, are more attentive to questions of social justice through their depiction of the poor as disproportionate sufferers of air pollution, calling for interventions that do not compromise livelihoods (Narain, 2016). They have, thus, responded to criticisms of elite environmentalism by being mindful of an underlying unevenness in political participation and in the ability to purchase technologies like purifiers to protect oneself from pollution. Even ecopreneurs attempt to reconcile their profit-making from the sale of pollution-ameliorating technologies by working with advocates and activists, and thinking through their actions with regards to the larger public interest. Chapters 3–5 of this book focus on the three communities of practice that have assumed importance in the air pollution problem space: those interested in knowing air scientifically and in the public communication of science; those interested in shaping, implementing, or contesting policy; and those interested in developing techno-solutions.

Breathing and thinking: a note on method

The book is not a primer on air pollution science or air quality management, a guide to protect oneself from pollution, or a resource on environmental law. There are several recent publications on these matters to which one may turn (cf Meattle and Aggarwal, 2018; Singh, 2018; Ghosh, 2019). Our work, instead, enters the backstage, so to say, to tease out the protagonists and stakes, locate them in time and space, and identify...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Blindspots and collaborations
• 3 Science for advocacy: thinking with expert-advocates
• 4 Governance and atmospheric citizenship
• 5 Smart business: ecopreneurship and its dilemmas
• 6 Postscript: COVID-19, air pollution, and environmentalism
• Index