ENVIRONMENT-INDIA: Car Fuel Policy Ignores Public Health

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Jan 10 2002 (IPS) - Health and environment activists are aghast at a new automobile fuel policy that sets the clock back on a Supreme Court order banning diesel use by buses and taxis plying India’s smoggy capital, and replacing it with environment-friendly compressed natural gas.

After a series of appeals by the government through last year pleading inability to comply with the order on the grounds of poor availability of compressed natural gas (CNG), an unmoved court finally set Jan. 31 as the deadline for all buses running on diesel to go off Delhi’s roads.

But encouraged by the interim report of a government committee formed to formulate fuel policy, released on Jan. 1, the usually tardy government rushed to approve it this week, drawing howls of protest by activists who have been campaigning against diesel use.

Sunita Narain, director of the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), India’s foremost voluntary environment group, said: “It is clear that the government does not care that millions die each year from pollution-related diseases and is interested solely in keeping industry happy.”

Neither the report nor the government has so far taken into account the testimony of leading cardiologists that the air in the Indian capital has dangerously high levels of soot and respirable suspended particles (RSP), a product of diesel combustion.

“Breathing the air of Delhi is the equivalent to smoking 20 packets of cigarettes a day,” says Krishan Kumar Aggarwal, a leading cardiologist and member of the Heart Care Foundation of India (HCFI), a well-known voluntary organisation.

According to CSE’s published estimate, at least 10,000 deaths in the capital, which has 12 million people, can be traced to vehicular pollution each year. Anil Agarwal, CSE’s founder and formidable campaigner for clean air who died last week, had blamed the asthma and cancer he suffered from on the capital’s pollutants.

During a visit to New Delhi last year as part of her global campaign against tobacco, World Health Organisation (WHO) chief Gro Harlem Brundtland admitted that the levels of vehicular pollution in the city were a greater concern than passive smoking.

In the winter months, smog (a mixture of smoke and fog) over the capital is dense enough to bring traffic to a crawl, cause the cancellation of flights and disrupt train services.

But, according to cardiologists, what goes unnoticed is the deadly effect that smog has on thousands of people with heart patients and those with chronic lung ailments such as asthma.

The Supreme Court noticed this though. “We cannot put the health of the public to risk,” it ruled last year at one of several hearings on pending public-interest litigation that seeks directions to the government to act on worsening air quality in this city.

The court was unimpressed by government counsel’s plea that implementing the order would bring traffic in the city to standstill and leave millions of commuters stranded because the bulk of Delhi’s 20,000-strong fleet of private and state-owned buses has yet to convert to CNG.

“This is like the story of a person who kills his father and his mother and then pleads for mercy in court on the grounds that he is an orphan,” the court said, blaming the government for inaction while vehicular pollution reached intolerable limits.

Although the apex court has been accused of activism by a powerful lobby of diesel-engine manufacturers and the petrochemical industry, it based its observations on impeccable authority — the autonomous Environment Protection Control Authority (EPCA) set up by the government itself.

Said a member of the authority who requested anonymity: “The judges are not fools and they are going to throw out the report of the committee. They have heard all these lame arguments before.”

While waiting for the next hearing of the court, the wrath of health and environment activists has fallen on the committee on automobile police and the man who headed it, R A Mashelkar, a respected scientist and head of the prestigious Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR).

“I can’t believe that Mashelkar actually wrote the committee’s report . I have too high a respect for that man to ascribe the report to him,” Narain said at press conference called by the CSE on Tuesday.

She said the centre’s main objection to Mashelkar’s report was that it once again emphasised controls on tailpipe emissions rather than on fuel quality and type. “We have to specify the fuel and the technology if we want to make a difference,” she argued.

Mashelkar argued that nowhere in the world is a single fuel prescribed as India’s Supreme Court has done with CNG. He supports those who advocate a free choice of engine and fuel types as long as they conform to existing pollution control standards.

Meanwhile, politicians who have been supporting the powerful bus and truck operators’ lobby — opposed to the switch from diesel to CNG — are claiming credit for the government’s attempt to reinstate diesel.

Madan Lal Khurana, a former chief minister of Delhi and leader of the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), said implementing the Supreme Court’s order would have meant phasing out some 12,000 buses at the end of this month.

Delhi does not have a mass rapid transit system, and visibly dilapidated and poorly maintained diesel buses operated by private companies are the only affordable means of commuting for millions of office goers and students.

Khurana claimed at a press conference Thursday that the government’s adoption of the Mashelkar committee’s report was the result of a meeting he had last week with Union Petroleum Minister Ram Naik and Law Minister Arun Jaitley.

Mashelkar has refused to comment on the speed with which the government adopted the report, but said that it was only an interim one and that a final report would be available only in March.