Long read: India’s air, water, land are all polluted. The government has failed to tackle this, says a new book

Subhash Chandra Garg is a former Finance Secretary of India and the Scroll has published an excerpt from his new book, “The Ten Trillion Dream Dented: The State of the Indian Economy and Reforms in Modi 2.0 (2019-2024)”, focusing on how little India’s central government and its state governments have been able to do with regards to air, water and soil pollution. The scale at which India has been polluted is staggering. Mr Garg writes, “More than 320 out of 521 rivers monitored for water quality by the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) in 2016 were found to be polluted (whose water is not fit for drinking). A 2015 CPCB report found that the number of polluted rivers in India increased from 121 to 275, and to 351 in 2018.

In 2019, as per the World Air Quality Report, India had the highest population-weighted annual average particulate matter (PM)2.5 exposure in the world at 83.2 micrograms per cubic metre (µg/m3) of air. The World Health Organization’s (WHO) safe limit for weighted annual average PM2.5 exposure is only 10 µg/m3. India was in the least healthy category of exposure, between 75 and 85 µg/m3. Over the period 2010–19, the country had seen the third-highest increase in exposure after Nigeria and Bangladesh….”

But even more than the scale of pollution, Mr Garg’s ire is directed at the steady dilution in the government’s efforts to deal with pollution. Mr Garg writes: “Environment Ministry kept diluting/postponing standards for thermal power plants…

The MoEFCC notified eighty-one standards across industries, including for major polluting industries, such as thermal power plants, sugar industry, cement industry and fertilizer industry, among others. The implementation of standards, however, was not that satisfactory.

A case in point is the notification of stringent emissions limits issued for sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, particulate matter, mercury and water usage in coal-based thermal power plants. The standards were first notified in 2015 and were to be complied with by 2017. In 2017, the power plants were granted a five-year extension (till December 2022) to meet the deadlines in a phased manner. Eleven plants in Delhi-NCR were to comply with the norms by 2019.

The MoEFCC kept diluting the standards after extending the deadline to 2019/2022. In June 2018, the water norms for units installed after January 2017 were diluted from 2.5 m3/MWh to 3 m3/MWh. In May 2019, the nitrogen oxide (NOx) norms for units installed in 2004–16 were diluted from 300 mg/ Nm3 to 450 mg/Nm3. In March 2021, the MoEFCC issued a notification specifying new deadlines for compliance, with the norms based on the location of the coal thermal power plants. In September 2022, the MoEFCC further extended the sulphur oxide (SOx) standards deadline to 2024.”

It is not just the Centre. The state governments are just as hopeless at dealing with pollution. Mr Garg’s case study here is the Delhi governments fruitless efforts to deal with air pollution inspite of a decade spent in promulgating ordinances, setting up commissions and “an oversight body which would have functions, including laying down parameters of air quality and environmental pollutants, to inspect premises violating the law and ordering closure of non-abiding industries/plants.

After a little flip-flop in which the Commission was denotified, a statutory commission was constituted on 23 April 2021 through the Commission for Air Quality Management in NCR and Adjoining Areas Act, 2021.”

Mr Garg then details further paper shuffling by the Delhi government’s political leaders and civil servants the net result of which was “While the government claimed improvement in air quality, the winter of 2023–24 witnessed the worst air pollution in Delhi and NCR. The “End of Winter Report 2023–24: Spread and scale of air pollution crisis in India’ issued by the Centre for Science and Environmental Analysis, noted that the ‘toxic air pollution came back to trouble the public yet again this winter”.

The air quality began to worsen much earlier than usual due to low rains in September–October and was made even worse due to low wind speed throughout the season. The report concluded that North and East India remained the most polluted regions of the country. The “air quality in North India was significantly worse this winter compared to the previous winter”. There was no improvement in the quality of air in Delhi…”

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