From the India Today archives (2015) | Delhi: Capital punishment
Every great city has its great joys and its great sorrows. So Delhi, a radial melting pot of cultures that has history at every corner, greenery on every sidewalk, and changes clothes and colours with the seasons, has been plagued with debilitating concerns over women's safety, and with something noxious, deleterious, downright nasty, in the air. According to multiple surveys in recent years by organisations ranging from the World Health Organisation (WHO) to the University of Surrey, and from the University of California at Berkeley to the Indian Institutes of Technology in Delhi, Kanpur and Mumbai, the city is now the most polluted in the world. An inglorious, undisputed leader in a dishonour roll that features 13 Indian cities among the top 20. A Delhi resident is today exposed to an average of 153 micrograms per cubic metre of PM 2.5-the smallest and most harmful of all measurable particulate matter-which is 15 times higher than the WHO's recommended annual average. And while this data may seem too obscure to raise alarm bells, and the effects of pollution too insidious to rattle the cage, disease and death is looming. Preying first on the most vulnerable-children, seniors, those with respiratory disorders-and slowly devouring even the most hardy. The stench of smoke, burning of the eyes, smoggy mornings, hazy nights, are all symptoms of a deeper malaise. Doctors associate high levels of suspended particulate matter and sulphur dioxide with increased mortality, morbidity and impaired pulmonary function. They say that fine particulates penetrate the respiratory system, and can alter the immune system, impair the liver and the kidney, and cause brain damage in children resulting in lower IQ, hyperactivity and lower concentration. The rise in carbon monoxide levels affects the cardiovascular system, particularly among children, and can attack the nervous system. Two studies endorsed by the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) in 2012 said that one in five adults and one in four children in Delhi suffered from upper respiratory diseases, and that these numbers were on an upward trend. There is no dispute any longer that drastic action is needed. In this winter of discontent when the ambient air quality is at its worst, emergency measures have suddenly become the order of the day as Delhi has emerged all of a sudden as a test case for pollution reforms that will have implications for cities such as, Gwalior, Patna and Ahmedabad that are suffering from similar problems (see box). The Arvind Kejriwal-led Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government has announced a series of half-measures-but measures nonetheless-to kick-start the fight. It has been buttressed by the judiciary, which has radical ideas of its own. So while one group has decided to restrict Delhi's private four-wheelers to even and odd registration plates on alternate days, a battle of one-upmanship has begun in which the other wants to restrict or phase out diesel vehicles altogether. Ignoring the hue and cry and the logistic nightmare both these plans throw up, the executive and the judiciary seem determined to finally bell the cat. While this is a good issue to be squabbling over, some key questions remain: what does the cat really look like, how did it become so menacing, is the bell loud enough, and are they trying to bell the wrong cat altogether? Perhaps the first step towards understanding Delhi's particular pollution problem is to understand the city-its aspirations, and its design. Delhi is primarily a network of localities, or a conglomerate of villages, linked by roads that intersect, bifurcate and overlap, like spaghetti in a bowl. It's a series of concentric circles with numerous entry and exit points, and has almost no dedicated commercial centre, and no clear housing pattern. It is as long as it is wide, unlike Mumbai which has changed gradually from a straight line along the sea to a narrow isosceles triangle. Its population is growing at an alarming rate, having nearly doubled from 10 million to 20 million in the last two decades. And new satellite towns such as Gurgaon and Noida, which now form an ominous National Capital Region because of seamless urban integration, are also as commercial as they are residential. DESIGN FLAW It is, in other words, a landlocked cauldron of smoke, surrounded by an even smokier periphery, without the natural advantage of replenishing its air that coastal cities have. On top of that, it has an organic growth pattern that makes it arduous to provide a mass transit system that works for everyone because of a lack of clarity between where people live, and where they work. It is, as Anumita Roychowdhury, executive director-Research and Advocacy at Centre of Science and Environment (CSE), puts it, "suffering from a design flaw". And as Rahul Mehrotra, urban planner and professor of Urban Design and Planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, describes it, "a victim of poor land-use planning". It's because of this haphazard structure that the greatest middle-class dream in Delhi is individual mobility, and the entire focus of its transport system has been to support private vehicles. To have made it in Delhi, is to have wheels under you. The city, as a result, has a total of 8.8 million vehicles, and adds an average of 1,400 vehicles to its arsenal every month. This is more than the vehicles in Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata combined, though about 60 per cent of these are two-wheelers.