• Clean Air & Sustainable Mobility

Delhi launches new plan to tackle air pollution, brakes likely on entry of trucks

The new policy provides for these measures to kick-in based on the early warning pollution forecasting system. NEW DELHI: Winter is still a few months away, but considering the alarming spike in air pollution post-Diwali every year, the Commission for Air Quality Management for Delhi-NCR has readied its plan to fight the annual battle with toxic air well ahead of time. The new policy, besides calling for larger interventions, has revamped the Graded Response Action Plan (GRAP) or the emergency action plan introducing some stringent measures, including ban on diesel-run four-wheelers (except for BS-VI compliant vehicles or those providing emergency services) in Delhi and bordering districts as well as on medium and heavy goods vehicles. The modified GRAP measures also call for a ban on entry of trucks except those carrying essential commodities within the city as well as on Delhi-registered medium and heavy goods vehicles under the ‘severe plus’ (when AQI is more than 450) or emergency category. So far, GRAP that comes into effect every winter (October 15 – March 31) to deal with different levels of air pollution, measures such as ban on entry of trucks and construction activities used to be implemented in a pre-emptive manner. The new policy provides for these measures to kick-in based on the early warning pollution forecasting system. According to experts in the nine-member panel, which formulated the new policy to curb pollution, ban on diesel-run four-wheelers under ‘severe plus’ category of pollution will help curb the extremely high pollution , as diesel is a major contributor to PM 2.5. Pushing for harsher curbs on the entry of heavy vehicles into Delhi’s city limits, the Commission for Air Quality Management (CAQM) for Delhi-NCR and adjoining states has formulated a new policy mandating new measures under the Graded Response Action Plan (GRAP). The ban under the emergency action plan will likely include diesel-run four-wheeled vehicles (LMVs), Delhi-registered diesel-run medium and heavy goods vehicles within city limits when air quality is in ‘severe plus’ or ‘emergency’ category. However, the plan mulls excluding BS-VI complaint vehicles or those providing emergency services. So far entry of trucks (except those carrying essential commodities) used to be restricted under the emergency action suggested under GRAP, which remains on the list of banned activities even now. The other measures include shutting down of schools, colleges and educational institutions, encouraging workplaces to have 50% work from home (WFH) and ban on construction and demolition projects, which have been implemented over the past years as well. The GRAP was first notified in 2017 by the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) to deal with different levels of pollution mainly during the winters when Delhi-NCR sees major smog episodes. The measures under the emergency action plan every year kick-in from October 15 and remain in place till March 31 depending on the categories of pollution during this time. Instead of previously existing five-six categories based on the levels of PM 2.5 and PM 10 --- the most prominent pollutants in the region – newly-modified GRAP now has four major categories of adverse pollution levels based on the air quality index (AQI) instead. These categories are – Stage-I, poor (201-300); Stage II, very poor (301-400); Stage III, severe (401-450); and Stage IV, severe plus or emergency (AQI>450). According to experts in the nine-member panel that have helped formulate the policy, the key regulations under the severe plus, severe and very poor stages will be invoked at least three days in advance of pollution predicted to reach that category based on the early warning pollution forecasting system developed by the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune. The GRAP has been modified to make emergency action more preventive than reactive, said experts. “The measures under GRAP have been revamped given the early warning system with the idea of cutting down on pollution levels before they go too high. Restricting the entry of diesel-run four-wheelers, trucks and medium and heavy goods vehicles under severe plus category will help in a major reduction in vehicular emissions which are the biggest contributor to PM 2.5 levels,” said Anumita Roychowdhury, executive director, Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) and a member of the panel. The CAQM had set up a nine-member panel to help formulate a policy that offers a permanent solution to the problem of air pollution in the region, which sees extremely high levels of pollution during winter months, in particular during November-December. ACTION SUGGESTED UNDER STAGES II, III & IV Severe plus Stop entry of truck traffic into Delhi (except those carrying essential commodities); ban on plying of Delhi registered diesel-run medium and heavy goods vehicles (except those carrying essential commodities); ban on plying of four-wheeler LMVs in Delhi and NCR districts bordering Delhi (except for BS-VI compliant vehicles and those carrying essentials); state governments to decide on allowing 50% staff strength to work from home (WFH); state governments may consider emergency measures like closure of schools/colleges/ educational institutions, plying of vehicles on odd-even basis; ban on industries in NCR operating on fuels other than PNG; ban on C&D activities in linear public projects such as highways, roads, flyovers, over bridges Severe State governments in Delhi-NCR may impose restrictions on BS-III petrol and BS-IV diesel LMVs (four-wheeled vehicles); ban on construction and demolition activities across Delhi-NCR (except emergent projects); regulate operation of industries in NCR not operating on PNG/clean fuels; shutting down of brick kilns, hot mix plants etc not operating on clean fuels; ban on mining activities in NCR Very poor Ban on diesel generator (DG) sets except for emergency services, ban on coal and firewood used in open eateries/restaurants across Delhi and adjoining NCR cities NEW MEASURES UNDER GRADED RESPONSE ACTION PLAN (GRAP) GRAP now has four categories of adverse air quality based on air quality index (AQI) Stage-I poor (201-300); Stage-II very poor (301-400) Stage-III severe (401-450) Stage-IV severe plus (AQI>450) Action suggested under stages II, III and IV to be invoked three days in advance based on early warning pollution forecasting system

• Clean Air & Sustainable Mobility

NEW DELHI: Winter is still a few months away, but considering the alarming spike in air pollution post-Diwali every year, the Commission for Air Quality Management for Delhi-NCR has readied its plan to fight the annual battle with toxic air well ahead of

NEW DELHI: The capital suffocates under smog every winter with the pollution monitoring agencies and enforcement bodies acting only after the city is right in the midst of a crisis. 1 However, changes announced on Wednesday in the Graded Response Action Plan (GRAP) - a set of anti-pollution measures which are staggered depending on the severity of the crisis and a minimum number of days it persists - will let the authorities take appropriate measures three days before the situation deteriorates to make some real difference. This will be facilitated by the latest technology which will help in anticipating the pollution levels in the near future. While earlier restrictions under GRAP were implemented only after the PM2.5 levels in Delhi-NCR remained beyond 'severe' levels for at least 48 hours, the new GRAP, revised by the Centre's panel, Commission for Air Quality Management (CAQM), will implement the curbs based on forecasts made by Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology. The new plan also entails a ban on four-wheeler diesel vehicles, including cars, running on BS-IV in Delhi and the bordering districts of NCR, if the AQI breaches the 450 mark. Experts: Early warning may help avert severe episodes Under the new GRAP for Delhi-NCR, there will be four different stages of adverse AQI: Stage I – Poor (AQI 201-300); Stage II – Very Poor (AQI 301-400); Stage III – Severe (AQI 401-450); and Stage IV – Severe Plus (AQI over 450). For these four different stages, GRAP will recommend a slew of specific measures, including a ban on the use of coal and firewood, diesel generator sets, construction, brick kilns, hot mix plants and other industries not operating on clean fuels and plying of diesel trucks in the city beside others. The GRAP has also left some scope for the state governments to take additional measures, such as announcing work-from-home and vehicle rationing schemes. Experts have welcomed these changes in the hope that the restrictions based on an early warning will help in averting worsening of pollution. “The framework for GRAP implementation has been refined to make it more preventive than reactive. Recent improvements in pollution forecasting allows us to have early warning systems to help implement preventive measures as per the AQI levels and avoid adding more pollution when a smog episode is expected to build up,” says Anumita Roychowdhury, executive director-research and advocacy, Centre For Science and environment. A member of the committee that brought about the changes in GRAP, Roychowdhury pointed out that when GRAP was first notified in January 2017 and was implemented in October that year, they didn’t have the necessary technology to anticipate the worsening of the situation. “Earlier, GRAP failed because Delhi did not have a forecasting system in 2016-17. A very basic forecasting used to happen at that time. So, one had to wait for 48 hours. Now, we have better science and IITM has a better forecasting system. Of course, CAQM and CPCB have to work together to see how the curbs can be implemented,” she added. CAQM has underlined that while it was necessary to introduce these changes, lack of adequate and appropriate infrastructure poses a hurdle in tackling pollution. “These measures help prevent adding of more pollution when the natural ventilation index is low and pollution cannot disperse. These are drastic but temporary measures. These measures need to be refined from time to time according to the exigency. However, the scope of application of these measures also remains limited if the systemic and infrastructure-level changes are inadequate in pollution sectors. For instance, vehicle restraint measures are difficult to implement during smog episodes if the public transport infrastructure is inadequate in the region,” said the CAQM.

• Clean Air & Sustainable Mobility

What We Really Lose When We Lose Our Environmental Protection Laws

The environment ministry’s proposal to weaken laws that deter environmental and ecological degradation threatens human health as well as important legal principles. Industry leaders must realise that many environment laws are apiece with the historical evolution of environmental consciousness in the country and can’t be wished away. Especially pernicious is the ministry’s idea to transform criminal offences into civil offences, which won’t deter the mega-corporations that are today’s biggest polluters. The first ever UN ‘Earth summit’ on the environment held in Stockholm in 1972 was appropriately, and simply, named the UN Conference on Human Environment. Those were early days in people’s growing environmental consciousness. The people were correctly worried about their own health and well-being being adversely affected by the pollution of their environment, chiefly their air and water. In India, these concerns found expression in a slew of legislative actions led by the vision and energy of the then Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, who – at the Stockholm conference – was the only head of state to participate other than the prime minister of the host country, Olof Palme. In her regime came first the Wildlife (Protection) Act 1972 followed by the Water Act in 1974. The Forest (Conservation) Act 1980 and the Air Act 1981 came in Gandhi’s second tenure as the prime minister, while the Environment (Protection) Act 1986 was promulgated in Rajiv Gandhi’s term. The Environment (Protection) Act was a response to the ghastly environmental tragedy that unfolded on the night of December 2-3 in Bhopal, when around 4,000 people died and several lakh were affected, many crippled for life. Perusing the preambles of the Water and Air Act and the Environment (Protection) Act makes it amply clear that these instruments were not brought into force for any altruistic love of clean water or air but because polluted water and air is a human health hazard. These were selfish pieces of legislation on the part of Indian parliamentarians, since they wished themselves to lead healthy lives, and wished the same for their compatriots and other life forms found in the land. The preamble to the Environment (Protection) Act in particular couldn’t have been clearer about this (emphasis added): An Act to provide for the protection and improvement of environment and for matters connected therewith: WHEREAS the decisions were taken at the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment held at Stockholm in June, 1972, in which India participated, to take appropriate steps for the protection and improvement of human environment; AND WHEREAS it is considered necessary further to implement the decisions aforesaid in so far as they relate to the protection and improvement of environment and the prevention of hazards to human beings, other living creatures, plants and property… A law is as effective as the penal clause that it advertises. Without an effective penal deterrent, it is just a worthless piece of paper. The Indian Penal Code, which is concerned largely with offences against ‘persons’ and ‘property’, helps maintain social order in society using the fear of punishment, including in the form of fines, imprisonment and even death in extreme cases. The loss of one’s social standing brought on by imprisonment is a more effective deterrent than monetary fines, no matter the quantum. So when the Union environment ministry wished in response to representations received from some quarters – read: polluters, current and potential – to soften the existing penal clauses in the Water, Air and Environment Acts, it is effectively admitting that the apex environmental guardian of the nation is okay with people facing health hazards, including deadly diseases from the consumption of polluted water, the inhalation of polluted air and the overall degradation of the life-environment. For how can ‘ease of doing business’, no matter how dirty, be compromised for the sake of health and welfare? We build hospitals for the sick, after all! Ironically, on March 1, 2022, Union environment minister Bhupender Yadav had himself released a report by the Centre for Science and Environment that said India has accounted for one of every four deaths worldwide due to air pollution in 2019. What form does the environment ministry’s decriminalisation take vis-à-vis these Acts? Effectively, the ministry is proposing to replace the penal clauses in these Acts – which currently provide for court action and followed by punishment by imprisonment and fines upon conviction – with only monetary fines, to be adjudicated by an executive authority appointed by the state. In legal terms, the ministry is proposing to convert a criminal offence into a civil offence. Imagine, for example, committing a murder and getting away by paying a fine. This analogy may not even be tenuous: polluting the air and the water is no less heinous than murder; it is just that the consequences play out in a matter of years, instead of hours. If the proposed dilution of the provisions of the Water, Air and Environment Acts are given effect, the door will open wider to en-masse risks to human health even as two well-established environmental principles – non-regression and ‘polluter pays’ – will go out the window. The two principles The principle of non-regression states that the ‘state should not weaken environmental laws’. It finds mention in at least 147 constitutive documents around the world and has been understood to be an essential part of the right to a healthy environment. In India, it finds expression in Article 21 of the Constitution, which includes the right to a healthy environment as interpreted by the Supreme Court. If lawmakers of the 1970s and 1980s incorporated the risk of imprisonment upon conviction for a violation of the Water, Air or Environment Acts as a deterrent against irresponsible, and increasingly wilful, acts by polluters, then there is no case today to replace it with simple fines, no matter how hefty. In short, the move itself would be illegal in the teeth of Article 21. ‘A polluter must pay and stop pollution’ is in a nutshell the message of the ‘polluter pays’ principle. The Supreme Court has in several cases emphasised it to be an integral part of India’s environmental jurisprudence. Here, ‘pay’ is not limited to monetary fines but also includes imprisonment upon conviction in a court. Limiting it to mean only money will change ‘polluter pays’ to ‘pay and pollute’. And who really fears monetary fines today? Certainly not the megacorporations that are also today’s worst offenders on this count. What exactly is the industry’s problem? As we understand, industrialists in India face two key challenges in the context of environment protection laws. One is the need to acquire several prior permissions from different agencies, according to procedures defined by different laws, before setting up a new industrial plant. And two: allegedly frequent rent-seeking by the implementers of these laws. Industry leaders must realise that many environment laws are apiece with the historical evolution of environmental consciousness in the country – so they can’t simply be wished away. The industry may at best seek the replacement of several laws by a single omnibus legislation that meets the environmental protection needs of the country without compromising on the rigour of the laws themselves. Surely the industrialists, their employees and all their children also need clean water and air and a safe environment as much as others. As for the rent-seeking: it is essentially a governance challenge that the executive cannot overcome by diluting existing laws. There is little, if any, guarantee that the executive office of the proposed adjudicating officer dispensing fines will itself not become another rent-seeker while also remaining vulnerable – unlike, presumably, judicial action – to undue external pressure. To be clear, the government has advanced an impression that its proposal is to decriminalise these laws by replacing criminal punishment, including imprisonment, for supposedly minor offences like non-submission of reports. But a fine reading of the proposal as found in the public domain reveals this to be not true. One example to show how little thought has gone into these amendments is the proposal to vest the role of the adjudicating officer in the office of the already overburdened district magistrates. This could become a recipe for bulldozing mechanisms for clean water, air and safe environment into the forgotten corners of our district collectorates. Three ways forward At this point, there are three reasonable ways forward. Union environment minister Bhupender Yadav is known for his youthful energy and has reportedly visited a large number of national parks and sanctuaries and a number of expert institutions associated with his ministry. This was presumably to get a first-hand feel of ground realities and is most welcome. On similar lines, the minister should visit some of the known ‘critically polluted’ locations like Chandrapur, Maharashtra; Korba, Chhattisgarh; Singrauli, Madhya Pradesh; Ankleshwar and Vapi, Gujarat; Pali, Rajasthan; and Patancheru-Bollaram, Telangana. Here, he should consider interacting with the people suffering through the polluted air, water and air – before deciding if what he is proposing is the right thing to do. Concurrently, there should be a series of public consultations in person at representative locations in the country, where the concerned officials present their understanding of the need for the proposed change, to an audience consisting of different stakeholders. Just a public notice with a strict time-frame in which to respond is hardly a substitute for participatory decision-making. Let us not forget that Jairam Ramesh, the environment minister in 2009, set a sterling precedent by engaging in such a series of consultations in the matter involving Bt brinjal. Photo: Nayan Bhalotia/Unsplash The environment ministry’s proposal to weaken laws that deter environmental and ecological degradation threatens human health as well as important legal principles. Industry leaders must realise that many environment laws are apiece with the historical evolution of environmental consciousness in the country and can’t be wished away. Especially pernicious is the ministry’s idea to transform criminal offences into civil offences, which won’t deter the mega-corporations that are today’s biggest polluters. The first ever UN ‘Earth summit’ on the environment held in Stockholm in 1972 was appropriately, and simply, named the UN Conference on Human Environment. Those were early days in people’s growing environmental consciousness. The people were correctly worried about their own health and well-being being adversely affected by the pollution of their environment, chiefly their air and water. In India, these concerns found expression in a slew of legislative actions led by the vision and energy of the then Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, who – at the Stockholm conference – was the only head of state to participate other than the prime minister of the host country, Olof Palme. In her regime came first the Wildlife (Protection) Act 1972 followed by the Water Act in 1974. The Forest (Conservation) Act 1980 and the Air Act 1981 came in Gandhi’s second tenure as the prime minister, while the Environment (Protection) Act 1986 was promulgated in Rajiv Gandhi’s term. The Environment (Protection) Act was a response to the ghastly environmental tragedy that unfolded on the night of December 2-3 in Bhopal, when around 4,000 people died and several lakh were affected, many crippled for life. Laws and penalty Workers cut-down trees for the Metro car shed project in the Aarey colony of Mumbai, Saturday on October 5, 2019. Photo: PTI Perusing the preambles of the Water and Air Act and the Environment (Protection) Act makes it amply clear that these instruments were not brought into force for any altruistic love of clean water or air but because polluted water and air is a human health hazard. These were selfish pieces of legislation on the part of Indian parliamentarians, since they wished themselves to lead healthy lives, and wished the same for their compatriots and other life forms found in the land. The preamble to the Environment (Protection) Act in particular couldn’t have been clearer about this (emphasis added): An Act to provide for the protection and improvement of environment and for matters connected therewith: WHEREAS the decisions were taken at the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment held at Stockholm in June, 1972, in which India participated, to take appropriate steps for the protection and improvement of human environment; AND WHEREAS it is considered necessary further to implement the decisions aforesaid in so far as they relate to the protection and improvement of environment and the prevention of hazards to human beings, other living creatures, plants and property… A law is as effective as the penal clause that it advertises. Without an effective penal deterrent, it is just a worthless piece of paper. The Indian Penal Code, which is concerned largely with offences against ‘persons’ and ‘property’, helps maintain social order in society using the fear of punishment, including in the form of fines, imprisonment and even death in extreme cases. The loss of one’s social standing brought on by imprisonment is a more effective deterrent than monetary fines, no matter the quantum. So when the Union environment ministry wished in response to representations received from some quarters – read: polluters, current and potential – to soften the existing penal clauses in the Water, Air and Environment Acts, it is effectively admitting that the apex environmental guardian of the nation is okay with people facing health hazards, including deadly diseases from the consumption of polluted water, the inhalation of polluted air and the overall degradation of the life-environment. For how can ‘ease of doing business’, no matter how dirty, be compromised for the sake of health and welfare? We build hospitals for the sick, after all! Ironically, on March 1, 2022, Union environment minister Bhupender Yadav had himself released a report by the Centre for Science and Environment that said India has accounted for one of every four deaths worldwide due to air pollution in 2019. Decriminalisation A couple poses during a pre-wedding photo shoot near India’s Presidential Palace, which is shrouded in smog, New Delhi, November 5, 2021. Photo: Reuters/Anushree Fadnavis What form does the environment ministry’s decriminalisation take vis-à-vis these Acts? Effectively, the ministry is proposing to replace the penal clauses in these Acts – which currently provide for court action and followed by punishment by imprisonment and fines upon conviction – with only monetary fines, to be adjudicated by an executive authority appointed by the state. In legal terms, the ministry is proposing to convert a criminal offence into a civil offence. Imagine, for example, committing a murder and getting away by paying a fine. This analogy may not even be tenuous: polluting the air and the water is no less heinous than murder; it is just that the consequences play out in a matter of years, instead of hours. If the proposed dilution of the provisions of the Water, Air and Environment Acts are given effect, the door will open wider to en-masse risks to human health even as two well-established environmental principles – non-regression and ‘polluter pays’ – will go out the window. The two principles Vedanta’s alumina refinery has been cleared for a six-fold expansion, its fly ash waste dumps set to grow to nearly 733 hectares at peak capacity. The dumps are located at the mouth of the Vamsadhara river that flows all the way to the city of Visakhapatnam. May 2017. The principle of non-regression states that the ‘state should not weaken environmental laws’. It finds mention in at least 147 constitutive documents around the world and has been understood to be an essential part of the right to a healthy environment. In India, it finds expression in Article 21 of the Constitution, which includes the right to a healthy environment as interpreted by the Supreme Court. If lawmakers of the 1970s and 1980s incorporated the risk of imprisonment upon conviction for a violation of the Water, Air or Environment Acts as a deterrent against irresponsible, and increasingly wilful, acts by polluters, then there is no case today to replace it with simple fines, no matter how hefty. In short, the move itself would be illegal in the teeth of Article 21. ‘A polluter must pay and stop pollution’ is in a nutshell the message of the ‘polluter pays’ principle. The Supreme Court has in several cases emphasised it to be an integral part of India’s environmental jurisprudence. Here, ‘pay’ is not limited to monetary fines but also includes imprisonment upon conviction in a court. Limiting it to mean only money will change ‘polluter pays’ to ‘pay and pollute’. And who really fears monetary fines today? Certainly not the megacorporations that are also today’s worst offenders on this count. What exactly is the industry’s problem? Baiga Adivasis in a protest walk. Credit: Wikimedia Commons As we understand, industrialists in India face two key challenges in the context of environment protection laws. One is the need to acquire several prior permissions from different agencies, according to procedures defined by different laws, before setting up a new industrial plant. And two: allegedly frequent rent-seeking by the implementers of these laws. Industry leaders must realise that many environment laws are apiece with the historical evolution of environmental consciousness in the country – so they can’t simply be wished away. The industry may at best seek the replacement of several laws by a single omnibus legislation that meets the environmental protection needs of the country without compromising on the rigour of the laws themselves. Surely the industrialists, their employees and all their children also need clean water and air and a safe environment as much as others. As for the rent-seeking: it is essentially a governance challenge that the executive cannot overcome by diluting existing laws. There is little, if any, guarantee that the executive office of the proposed adjudicating officer dispensing fines will itself not become another rent-seeker while also remaining vulnerable – unlike, presumably, judicial action – to undue external pressure. To be clear, the government has advanced an impression that its proposal is to decriminalise these laws by replacing criminal punishment, including imprisonment, for supposedly minor offences like non-submission of reports. But a fine reading of the proposal as found in the public domain reveals this to be not true. One example to show how little thought has gone into these amendments is the proposal to vest the role of the adjudicating officer in the office of the already overburdened district magistrates. This could become a recipe for bulldozing mechanisms for clean water, air and safe environment into the forgotten corners of our district collectorates. Three ways forward Union environment minister Bhupender Yadav at the COP26 summit in Glasgow, November 13, 2021. Photo: Reuters/Phil Noble At this point, there are three reasonable ways forward. Union environment minister Bhupender Yadav is known for his youthful energy and has reportedly visited a large number of national parks and sanctuaries and a number of expert institutions associated with his ministry. This was presumably to get a first-hand feel of ground realities and is most welcome. On similar lines, the minister should visit some of the known ‘critically polluted’ locations like Chandrapur, Maharashtra; Korba, Chhattisgarh; Singrauli, Madhya Pradesh; Ankleshwar and Vapi, Gujarat; Pali, Rajasthan; and Patancheru-Bollaram, Telangana. Here, he should consider interacting with the people suffering through the polluted air, water and air – before deciding if what he is proposing is the right thing to do. Concurrently, there should be a series of public consultations in person at representative locations in the country, where the concerned officials present their understanding of the need for the proposed change, to an audience consisting of different stakeholders. Just a public notice with a strict time-frame in which to respond is hardly a substitute for participatory decision-making. Let us not forget that Jairam Ramesh, the environment minister in 2009, set a sterling precedent by engaging in such a series of consultations in the matter involving Bt brinjal. Second, let the environment ministry draft an omnibus law for climate change and the human environment that incorporates the provisions of the Water, Air and Environment (Protection) Acts, and such that the combined law presents a single window of approval for any existing or prospecting business-person wishing to set up an industrial facility. Finally, let the environment ministry revive the proposal for a ‘National Environment Protection Agency’ (suggested but not realised in the time of Jairam Ramesh as environment minister). This will help set up an independent implementer of environmental laws with full authority and accountability.

• Industrial Pollution

SERIKALI INATAKA KUONA HALI YA USAFI KATIKA ZIWA VICTORIA INAKUWA ENDELEVU-WAZIRI JAFO

Mkurugenzi wa CSE, Dkt. Sunita Narain akizungumza katika uzinduzi wa Mpango Mkakati wa kusimamia Mazingira katika Ziwa Victoria. Uzinduzi huo umefanyika leo Julai 13,2022 Jijini Dar es Salaam. ************************** NA EMMANUEL MBATILO, DAR ES SALAAM Waziri wa Nchi Ofisi ya Makamu wa Rais (Muungano na Mazingira), Mhe. Dkt. Selemani Jafo amesema kuimirika kwa usafi wa mazingira kunapunguza kwa kiasi kikubwa mlipuko wa magonjwa mbalimbali hivyo wananchi kwa ujumla wanajukumu la kulinda na kutunza mazingira katika maeneo yanayowazunguka. Ameyasema hayo leo Julai 13,2022 Jijini Dar es Salaam wakati akizindua Mpango Mkakati wa kusimamia Mazingira katika Ziwa Victoria. Mpango huo unaratibiwa na Kituo cha Sayansi ya Mazingira Center for Science Environment (CSE) cha nchini India ambacho kimekuwa kikitafiti chanzo cha uchafuzi wa ziwa hilo na kutafuta majibu yake. Amesema Serikali inataka kuona hali ya usafi katika ziwa victoria inakuwa endelevu katika kipindi chote hata katika kipindi cha msimu wa mvua na kuwafanya wadau kuvutika zaidi. Aidha Waziri Jafo amesema ziwa Victoria limekuwa chanzo kikubwa cha maji ya Mto Nile ambao unategemewa na zaidi ya watu milioni 40 kwa shughuli mbalimbali za kiuchumi kwa kilimo na uvuvi. “Hili ziwa ni kubwa sana na linategemewa zaidi duniani kwasababu maji yake ndiyo uchumi wa wenzetu kwa hiyo ninapoona wadau kama nyinyi mnajitokeza kulilinda inanipa moyo sana, wenzetu Misri wanategemea sana mto Nile ambao unapata maji kupitia ziwa Victoria, ” Amesema Waziri Jafo. Pamoja na hayo Waziri Jafo amepongeza ushirikiano mwema uliopo baina ya serikali ya Tanzania na India ambayo alisema kwa sasa inafadhili miradi 28 ya maji yenye thamani ya zaidi ya trilioni moja kwenye mikoa mbalimbali nchini na tayari imeshaanza kujengwa. “Serikali ya India inatusaidia sana kwenye mambo mengi sasa ninapoona na nyinyi mmekuja kutusaidia kulinda ziwa Victoria dhidi ya uchafuzi wa mazingira yake inazidi kunipa amani ya moyo kwamba nyinyi ni ndugu zetu na mnapenda maendeleo yetu,” Amesema Kwa upande wake Mkurugenzi Mkuu wa Baraza la Taifa la Usimamizi na Uhifadhi wa Mazingira (NEMC), Dkt. Samuel Gwamaka, amesema Baraza lipo tayari kushirikiana na wadau mbalimbali katika shughuli za uhifadhi wa mazingira nchini. Amesema wanashirikiana katika kuandaa shughuli mbalimbali za kimazingira ikiwa ni pamoja na uandaaji wa Mpango Mkakati wa Usimamizi wa Mazingira kwa Ziwa Victoria na kwamba uandaaji wa mpango huo umezingatia miongozo mbalimbali ya nchi. “Uanzishaji wa mkakati huu ni jitihada za Baraza katika utekelezaji wa Mkakati Kabambe wa Mazingira wa Taifa wa Mwaka 2022/32 uliozinduliwa rasmi mwezi Juni 2022 na pia Ajenda ya Taifa ya Tafiti za Mazingira (2017/22),” Amesema Dkt.Gwamaka. Kwa upande wake, Mkurugenzi wa CSE, Dkt. Sunita Narain, alipongeza jitihada zinazofanywa na serikali kulinda na kuhifadhi mazingira na kwa namna ambavyo kituo hicho kimepata mapokezi mazuri. “Tunaishukuru serikali ya Tanzania kwa kutupokea vizuri tangu tulipofika nchini mwezi uliopita, tumetembelea ziwa Victoria kujionea hali ilivyo na tumeridhika kwa namna mikakati inavyowekwa kulilinda dhidi ya uchafuzi,” Amesema Dkt. Suniti.

• Industrial Pollution

WAZIRI JAFO AHIMIZA UTUNZAJI WA MAZINGIRA KATIKA ZIWA VICTORIA

NA EMMANUEL MBATILO, DAR ES SALAAM Waziri wa Nchi Ofisi ya Makamu wa Rais (Muungano na Mazingira), Mhe. Dkt. Selemani Jafo amesema kuimirika kwa usafi wa mazingira kunapunguza kwa kiasi kikubwa mlipuko wa magonjwa mbalimbali hivyo wananchi kwa ujumla wanajukumu la kulinda na kutunza mazingira katika maeneo yanayowazunguka. Ameyasema hayo leo Julai 13,2022 Jijini Dar es Salaam wakati akizindua Mpango Mkakati wa kusimamia Mazingira katika Ziwa Victoria. Mpango huo unaratibiwa na Kituo cha Sayansi ya Mazingira Center for Science Environment (CSE) cha nchini India ambacho kimekuwa kikitafiti chanzo cha uchafuzi wa ziwa hilo na kutafuta majibu yake. Amesema Serikali inataka kuona hali ya usafi katika ziwa victoria inakuwa endelevu katika kipindi chote hata katika kipindi cha msimu wa mvua na kuwafanya wadau kuvutika zaidi. Aidha Waziri Jafo amesema ziwa Victoria limekuwa chanzo kikubwa cha maji ya Mto Nile ambao unategemewa na zaidi ya watu milioni 40 kwa shughuli mbalimbali za kiuchumi kwa kilimo na uvuvi. “Hili ziwa ni kubwa sana na linategemewa zaidi duniani kwasababu maji yake ndiyo uchumi wa wenzetu kwa hiyo ninapoona wadau kama nyinyi mnajitokeza kulilinda inanipa moyo sana, wenzetu Misri wanategemea sana mto Nile ambao unapata maji kupitia ziwa Victoria, ” Amesema Waziri Jafo. Pamoja na hayo Waziri Jafo amepongeza ushirikiano mwema uliopo baina ya serikali ya Tanzania na India ambayo alisema kwa sasa inafadhili miradi 28 ya maji yenye thamani ya zaidi ya trilioni moja kwenye mikoa mbalimbali nchini na tayari imeshaanza kujengwa. “Serikali ya India inatusaidia sana kwenye mambo mengi sasa ninapoona na nyinyi mmekuja kutusaidia kulinda ziwa Victoria dhidi ya uchafuzi wa mazingira yake inazidi kunipa amani ya moyo kwamba nyinyi ni ndugu zetu na mnapenda maendeleo yetu,” Amesema Kwa upande wake Mkurugenzi Mkuu wa Baraza la Taifa la Usimamizi na Uhifadhi wa Mazingira (NEMC), Dkt. Samuel Gwamaka, amesema Baraza lipo tayari kushirikiana na wadau mbalimbali katika shughuli za uhifadhi wa mazingira nchini. Amesema wanashirikiana katika kuandaa shughuli mbalimbali za kimazingira ikiwa ni pamoja na uandaaji wa Mpango Mkakati wa Usimamizi wa Mazingira kwa Ziwa Victoria na kwamba uandaaji wa mpango huo umezingatia miongozo mbalimbali ya nchi. “Uanzishaji wa mkakati huu ni jitihada za Baraza katika utekelezaji wa Mkakati Kabambe wa Mazingira wa Taifa wa Mwaka 2022/32 uliozinduliwa rasmi mwezi Juni 2022 na pia Ajenda ya Taifa ya Tafiti za Mazingira (2017/22),” Amesema Dkt.Gwamaka. Kwa upande wake, Mkurugenzi wa CSE, Dkt. Sunita Narain, alipongeza jitihada zinazofanywa na serikali kulinda na kuhifadhi mazingira na kwa namna ambavyo kituo hicho kimepata mapokezi mazuri. “Tunaishukuru serikali ya Tanzania kwa kutupokea vizuri tangu tulipofika nchini mwezi uliopita, tumetembelea ziwa Victoria kujionea hali ilivyo na tumeridhika kwa namna mikakati inavyowekwa kulilinda dhidi ya uchafuzi,” Amesema Dkt. Suniti.

• Industrial Pollution

WAZIRI JAFO-KUIMARIKA KWA USAFI WA MAZINGIRA KUNAPUNGUZA KWA KIASI KIKUBWA MLIPUKO WA MAGONJWA

NA EMMANUEL MBATILO, DAR ES SALAAM Waziri wa Nchi Ofisi ya Makamu wa Rais (Muungano na Mazingira), Mhe. Dkt. Selemani Jafo amesema kuimirika kwa usafi wa mazingira kunapunguza kwa kiasi kikubwa mlipuko wa magonjwa mbalimbali hivyo wananchi kwa ujumla wanajukumu la kulinda na kutunza mazingira katika maeneo yanayowazunguka. Ameyasema hayo leo Julai 13,2022 Jijini Dar es Salaam wakati akizindua Mpango Mkakati wa kusimamia Mazingira katika Ziwa Victoria. Mpango huo unaratibiwa na Kituo cha Sayansi ya Mazingira Center for Science Environment (CSE) cha nchini India ambacho kimekuwa kikitafiti chanzo cha uchafuzi wa ziwa hilo na kutafuta majibu yake. Amesema Serikali inataka kuona hali ya usafi katika ziwa victoria inakuwa endelevu katika kipindi chote hata katika kipindi cha msimu wa mvua na kuwafanya wadau kuvutika zaidi. Aidha Waziri Jafo amesema ziwa Victoria limekuwa chanzo kikubwa cha maji ya Mto Nile ambao unategemewa na zaidi ya watu milioni 40 kwa shughuli mbalimbali za kiuchumi kwa kilimo na uvuvi. “Hili ziwa ni kubwa sana na linategemewa zaidi duniani kwasababu maji yake ndiyo uchumi wa wenzetu kwa hiyo ninapoona wadau kama nyinyi mnajitokeza kulilinda inanipa moyo sana, wenzetu Misri wanategemea sana mto Nile ambao unapata maji kupitia ziwa Victoria, ” Amesema Waziri Jafo. Pamoja na hayo Waziri Jafo amepongeza ushirikiano mwema uliopo baina ya serikali ya Tanzania na India ambayo alisema kwa sasa inafadhili miradi 28 ya maji yenye thamani ya zaidi ya trilioni moja kwenye mikoa mbalimbali nchini na tayari imeshaanza kujengwa. “Serikali ya India inatusaidia sana kwenye mambo mengi sasa ninapoona na nyinyi mmekuja kutusaidia kulinda ziwa Victoria dhidi ya uchafuzi wa mazingira yake inazidi kunipa amani ya moyo kwamba nyinyi ni ndugu zetu na mnapenda maendeleo yetu,” Amesema Kwa upande wake Mkurugenzi Mkuu wa Baraza la Taifa la Usimamizi na Uhifadhi wa Mazingira (NEMC), Dkt. Samuel Gwamaka, amesema Baraza lipo tayari kushirikiana na wadau mbalimbali katika shughuli za uhifadhi wa mazingira nchini. Amesema wanashirikiana katika kuandaa shughuli mbalimbali za kimazingira ikiwa ni pamoja na uandaaji wa Mpango Mkakati wa Usimamizi wa Mazingira kwa Ziwa Victoria na kwamba uandaaji wa mpango huo umezingatia miongozo mbalimbali ya nchi. “Uanzishaji wa mkakati huu ni jitihada za Baraza katika utekelezaji wa Mkakati Kabambe wa Mazingira wa Taifa wa Mwaka 2022/32 uliozinduliwa rasmi mwezi Juni 2022 na pia Ajenda ya Taifa ya Tafiti za Mazingira (2017/22),” Amesema Dkt.Gwamaka. Kwa upande wake, Mkurugenzi wa CSE, Dkt. Sunita Narain, alipongeza jitihada zinazofanywa na serikali kulinda na kuhifadhi mazingira na kwa namna ambavyo kituo hicho kimepata mapokezi mazuri. “Tunaishukuru serikali ya Tanzania kwa kutupokea vizuri tangu tulipofika nchini mwezi uliopita, tumetembelea ziwa Victoria kujionea hali ilivyo na tumeridhika kwa namna mikakati inavyowekwa kulilinda dhidi ya uchafuzi,” Amesema Dkt. Suniti.

• Industrial Pollution

WAZIRI JAFO AHIMIZA UTUNZAJI WA MAZINGIRA KATIKA ZIWA VICTORIA

NA EMMANUEL MBATILO, DAR ES SALAAM Waziri wa Nchi Ofisi ya Makamu wa Rais (Muungano na Mazingira), Mhe. Dkt. Selemani Jafo amesema kuimirika kwa usafi wa mazingira kunapunguza kwa kiasi kikubwa mlipuko wa magonjwa mbalimbali hivyo wananchi kwa ujumla wanajukumu la kulinda na kutunza mazingira katika maeneo yanayowazunguka. Ameyasema hayo leo Julai 13,2022 Jijini Dar es Salaam wakati akizindua Mpango Mkakati wa kusimamia Mazingira katika Ziwa Victoria. Mpango huo unaratibiwa na Kituo cha Sayansi ya Mazingira Center for Science Environment (CSE) cha nchini India ambacho kimekuwa kikitafiti chanzo cha uchafuzi wa ziwa hilo na kutafuta majibu yake. Amesema Serikali inataka kuona hali ya usafi katika ziwa victoria inakuwa endelevu katika kipindi chote hata katika kipindi cha msimu wa mvua na kuwafanya wadau kuvutika zaidi. Aidha Waziri Jafo amesema ziwa Victoria limekuwa chanzo kikubwa cha maji ya Mto Nile ambao unategemewa na zaidi ya watu milioni 40 kwa shughuli mbalimbali za kiuchumi kwa kilimo na uvuvi. “Hili ziwa ni kubwa sana na linategemewa zaidi duniani kwasababu maji yake ndiyo uchumi wa wenzetu kwa hiyo ninapoona wadau kama nyinyi mnajitokeza kulilinda inanipa moyo sana, wenzetu Misri wanategemea sana mto Nile ambao unapata maji kupitia ziwa Victoria, ” Amesema Waziri Jafo. Pamoja na hayo Waziri Jafo amepongeza ushirikiano mwema uliopo baina ya serikali ya Tanzania na India ambayo alisema kwa sasa inafadhili miradi 28 ya maji yenye thamani ya zaidi ya trilioni moja kwenye mikoa mbalimbali nchini na tayari imeshaanza kujengwa. “Serikali ya India inatusaidia sana kwenye mambo mengi sasa ninapoona na nyinyi mmekuja kutusaidia kulinda ziwa Victoria dhidi ya uchafuzi wa mazingira yake inazidi kunipa amani ya moyo kwamba nyinyi ni ndugu zetu na mnapenda maendeleo yetu,” Amesema Kwa upande wake Mkurugenzi Mkuu wa Baraza la Taifa la Usimamizi na Uhifadhi wa Mazingira (NEMC), Dkt. Samuel Gwamaka, amesema Baraza lipo tayari kushirikiana na wadau mbalimbali katika shughuli za uhifadhi wa mazingira nchini. Amesema wanashirikiana katika kuandaa shughuli mbalimbali za kimazingira ikiwa ni pamoja na uandaaji wa Mpango Mkakati wa Usimamizi wa Mazingira kwa Ziwa Victoria na kwamba uandaaji wa mpango huo umezingatia miongozo mbalimbali ya nchi. “Uanzishaji wa mkakati huu ni jitihada za Baraza katika utekelezaji wa Mkakati Kabambe wa Mazingira wa Taifa wa Mwaka 2022/32 uliozinduliwa rasmi mwezi Juni 2022 na pia Ajenda ya Taifa ya Tafiti za Mazingira (2017/22),” Amesema Dkt.Gwamaka. Kwa upande wake, Mkurugenzi wa CSE, Dkt. Sunita Narain, alipongeza jitihada zinazofanywa na serikali kulinda na kuhifadhi mazingira na kwa namna ambavyo kituo hicho kimepata mapokezi mazuri. “Tunaishukuru serikali ya Tanzania kwa kutupokea vizuri tangu tulipofika nchini mwezi uliopita, tumetembelea ziwa Victoria kujionea hali ilivyo na tumeridhika kwa namna mikakati inavyowekwa kulilinda dhidi ya uchafuzi,” Amesema Dkt. Suniti.

• Industrial Pollution

JAFO MINISTER LAUNCHES STRATEGIC PLAN FOR ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT IN LAKE VICTORIA

For details please click on the link TAARIFA YA HABARI YA USIKU CHANNEL TEN

• Industrial Pollution

WAZIRI JAFO AZINDUA MPANGO MKAKATI WA KUSIMAMIA MAZINGIRA KATIKA ZIWA VICTORIA

NA EMMANUEL MBATILO, DAR ES SALAAM Waziri wa Nchi Ofisi ya Makamu wa Rais (Muungano na Mazingira), Mhe. Dkt. Selemani Jafo amesema kuimirika kwa usafi wa mazingira kunapunguza kwa kiasi kikubwa mlipuko wa magonjwa mbalimbali hivyo wananchi kwa ujumla wanajukumu la kulinda na kutunza mazingira katika maeneo yanayowazunguka. Ameyasema hayo leo Julai 13,2022 Jijini Dar es Salaam wakati akizindua Mpango Mkakati wa kusimamia Mazingira katika Ziwa Victoria. Mpango huo unaratibiwa na Kituo cha Sayansi ya Mazingira Center for Science Environment (CSE) cha nchini India ambacho kimekuwa kikitafiti chanzo cha uchafuzi wa ziwa hilo na kutafuta majibu yake. Amesema Serikali inataka kuona hali ya usafi katika ziwa victoria inakuwa endelevu katika kipindi chote hata katika kipindi cha msimu wa mvua na kuwafanya wadau kuvutika zaidi. Aidha Waziri Jafo amesema ziwa Victoria limekuwa chanzo kikubwa cha maji ya Mto Nile ambao unategemewa na zaidi ya watu milioni 40 kwa shughuli mbalimbali za kiuchumi kwa kilimo na uvuvi. “Hili ziwa ni kubwa sana na linategemewa zaidi duniani kwasababu maji yake ndiyo uchumi wa wenzetu kwa hiyo ninapoona wadau kama nyinyi mnajitokeza kulilinda inanipa moyo sana, wenzetu Misri wanategemea sana mto Nile ambao unapata maji kupitia ziwa Victoria, ” Amesema Waziri Jafo. Pamoja na hayo Waziri Jafo amepongeza ushirikiano mwema uliopo baina ya serikali ya Tanzania na India ambayo alisema kwa sasa inafadhili miradi 28 ya maji yenye thamani ya zaidi ya trilioni moja kwenye mikoa mbalimbali nchini na tayari imeshaanza kujengwa. “Serikali ya India inatusaidia sana kwenye mambo mengi sasa ninapoona na nyinyi mmekuja kutusaidia kulinda ziwa Victoria dhidi ya uchafuzi wa mazingira yake inazidi kunipa amani ya moyo kwamba nyinyi ni ndugu zetu na mnapenda maendeleo yetu,” Amesema Kwa upande wake Mkurugenzi Mkuu wa Baraza la Taifa la Usimamizi na Uhifadhi wa Mazingira (NEMC), Dkt. Samuel Gwamaka, amesema Baraza lipo tayari kushirikiana na wadau mbalimbali katika shughuli za uhifadhi wa mazingira nchini. Amesema wanashirikiana katika kuandaa shughuli mbalimbali za kimazingira ikiwa ni pamoja na uandaaji wa Mpango Mkakati wa Usimamizi wa Mazingira kwa Ziwa Victoria na kwamba uandaaji wa mpango huo umezingatia miongozo mbalimbali ya nchi. “Uanzishaji wa mkakati huu ni jitihada za Baraza katika utekelezaji wa Mkakati Kabambe wa Mazingira wa Taifa wa Mwaka 2022/32 uliozinduliwa rasmi mwezi Juni 2022 na pia Ajenda ya Taifa ya Tafiti za Mazingira (2017/22),” Amesema Dkt.Gwamaka. Kwa upande wake, Mkurugenzi wa CSE, Dkt. Sunita Narain, alipongeza jitihada zinazofanywa na serikali kulinda na kuhifadhi mazingira na kwa namna ambavyo kituo hicho kimepata mapokezi mazuri. “Tunaishukuru serikali ya Tanzania kwa kutupokea vizuri tangu tulipofika nchini mwezi uliopita, tumetembelea ziwa Victoria kujionea hali ilivyo na tumeridhika kwa namna mikakati inavyowekwa kulilinda dhidi ya uchafuzi,” Amesema Dkt. Suniti.

• Industrial Pollution

Protect Lake Victoria against pollution, says government

Protect Lake Victoria against pollution, says government For details please see the attachment.

• Industrial Pollution

Stakeholders urged to protect Lake Victoria

Stakeholders urged to protect Lake Victoria For details please see the attachment.

• Urban Lab

The Mysteriously Low Death Toll of the Heat Waves in India and Pakistan

It’s the monsoon now in India, which means it is possible to look back on the extraordinary succession of heat waves that swept across South Asia starting this spring — and begin, at least, to take stock of their impact. From late March through the end of June, a period of almost 100 days, high temperatures in Delhi were above 100 degrees Fahrenheit on all but 15 of them, with many days breaking 110 degrees. For large parts of those months, the punishing heat stretched over much of the subcontinent, often blanketing more than a billion people and in certain places crossing 122 degrees. In May, the World Weather Attribution initiative, a research alliance connecting extreme events to global warming in real time, declared that the initial wave had been made 30 times more likely by climate change. And the heat kept coming. For more than a decade, scientists have talked about an “upper limit” of human survivability, reached when the combination of heat and humidity produces what’s called a “wet-bulb temperature” of 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit) for six hours — above that level, it is believed that exposure would kill even young, healthy people. But at lower wet-bulb readings, and even in low-humidity extreme heat, health suffers too, especially among those with other vulnerabilities, exacerbating all kinds of conditions (not to mention damaging infrastructure, driving power outages, and limiting labor productivity). A more recent set of studies even suggested the maximum wet-bulb threshold might be lower for humans — as low as 31 degrees Celsius (88 degrees Fahrenheit) at 100 percent humidity or 38 degrees Celsius (100 degrees Fahrenheit) at 60 percent humidity. For the vulnerable, of course, the effects hit much sooner. The monthslong heat in South Asia breached these levels at several points. In Jacobabad, Pakistan, a small city of less than 200,000, wet-bulb temperatures briefly hit 91.4 in May. Late last month, with the monsoon bringing humidity with them, the wet-bulb in Delhi, where almost 20 million people live, reportedly reached as high as 92.7. The readings produced a wave of climate panic: Berkeley Earth’s Robert Rohde warned “this heat wave is likely to kill thousands,” and The Washington Post reported “India’s heat waves are testing the limits of human survival.” (I had the same worry, as did others at The Times, The Economist, the World Economic Forum and elsewhere.) And yet while there have been casualties and brutal effects, these events do not yet appear to have caused mass death. An early estimate of the death toll was just 90 across India and Pakistan, a fraction of the more than 1,000 killed by the heat dome that struck the Pacific Northwest (including western Canada) last summer, where lower temperatures hit millions for a much shorter period of time. (In Seattle, it was above 100 for only three days, with a peak of 108; in Portland, it reached 116.) It’s an even smaller fraction of the number who died in the 2003 and 2010 heat waves in Europe and Russia, which killed 70,000 and 55,000. In those heat waves, only a handful of places crossed 104 degrees Fahrenheit. According to Dr. Chandni Singh, a senior researcher at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements and a lead author of the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change chapter on adaptation, it’s likely that this year’s heat event in India will not even be as lethal as one there in 2015 when high temperatures across the country killed several thousand. When I spoke to the Indian climate activist Disha Ravi, she described recent floods — which have killed more than 100 across India and Bangladesh, and displaced many millions — as a more pressing climate matter locally and the one that had been preoccupying her much more, recently, than the heat. What explains the relatively low death toll in India and Pakistan from the recent heat? It is still too early to say definitively. That goes double given the limited data about all the impacts of the heat wave — not just on human health, but also on agriculture, labor and economic activity, and more. But the question is a hugely consequential one: About a fifth of the human population was just subjected to almost unimaginably long-lasting extreme heat, and the ultimate toll, if we can accurately assess it, will tell us quite a lot about how some of us might suffer through the future climate. If the current pattern continues to hold, with fuller calculations showing a still relatively limited impact, five hypotheses provide at least partial explanations: problems with data; the dryness of the heat wave; local adaptation and response; that the hottest parts of the world may already be relatively acclimated to extreme heat; and that our casual use of “wet-bulb” readings may be misleading about actual mortality risk. (The brutal, long-duration experience also suggests some important caveats.) First, the official death count is an undercount. This was the interpretation offered to me by Dr. Friederike Otto, of World Weather Attribution, in May; by Kathy Baughman-McLeod, director of the Atlantic Council’s Arsht-Rockefeller Resilience Center, in June; and by Avikal Somvanshi, of India’s Center for Science and the Environment, in July. In fact, it was the first thing mentioned by everyone I spoke to, in India and Pakistan and elsewhere, when discussing the toll of the heat wave. Heat is something of an epistemological and epidemiological challenge to doctors and coroners, even in places most conscientious about data collection. That’s because few deaths even under the most extreme temperature conditions present obviously as heat stress; mostly, fatalities accrue when underlying conditions are exacerbated or made worse by the additional strain. Aditya Valiathan Pillai, an associate fellow at India’s Center for Policy Research, went to emergency rooms “just to see if the fact that nothing was popping up in the media about people dying was true or whether it was sort of a mortality whitewash, the way we saw with Covid,” he said. “And universally, I went to government hospitals and they said, we did see a steady uptake in the number of people showing up, but very few deaths. Then again, all of them raised their hands and said, we don’t really actually know how to count a heat death. And so we’re not entirely sure.” A full accounting of the toll of any heat wave requires “excess mortality data” — overall accounting of how many people died in a given period above a baseline average — but compiling that can take months, wherever the extreme event hits. Without it, Baughman-McLeod said, “we don’t know how many, because we don’t count properly. The data collection isn’t there — whether in India or in the U.S.” For his part, Somvanshi estimates that the ultimate toll of these heat waves will be “at least twice than what is officially reported. But based on the available information, it will most probably be much more than twice.” A simple doubling of data still yields a relatively low estimate; getting even to the 2015 toll in India would require something like a 20-fold adjustment. To get to the mortality levels of the European heat waves, a much larger adjustment still. Second, for mortality, humidity matters enormously. “Humid heat is more dangerous to human health and well-being than dry heat,” Somvanshi said. Through much of the heat wave, the temperatures were alarmingly high but humidity relatively low — making those truly concerning wet-bulb readings relatively rare and brief, even through the oppressively hot spring. And when temperatures are high but humidity is low, the burden is more manageable — in part because it is, in certain ways, familiar. In India and Pakistan, the temperatures of the past few months were record-breaking when they happened, for the late spring, but not unheard-of in a typical Indian summer. That made them, for Somvanshi, “unusual from the climate perspective, but from people’s perspective, in Delhi and even most of northern India, we are used to having 40-plus during the summer. It’s just that for us, it happened a little earlier. So, as people, we were kind of surprised, but not very much concerned or disturbed by it.” But he noted that the traditionally drier parts of the country are increasingly getting more humid, and the traditionally humid parts of the country are getting hotter — and this year’s monsoon has not brought all that much relief. In Delhi, he said, “If you take the combined impact of humidity and heat of temperature, then it’s much worse conditions right now than it was in March and April or even May. And that’s something which doesn’t capture the media attention.” Third, cultural practices and adaptation are playing a role — though there is still a long way to go. When projecting heat impacts, both immediate and longer term, it is easy enough to assume an essentially passive population: You take what you know the future holds and calculate the impact that would have on the world as it is today. The result is an intuitive picture of climate horror that has informed both some scientific projections of the next decades and popular dramatizations like the one that opens Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel “The Ministry for the Future.” But while visions of quasi-apocalypse often center on India, where climate impacts are projected to be especially intense, that conceptual modeling is both patronizing and “fatalistic,” said Tim Sahay, a Mumbai-born climate policy expert. He pointed me to research showing a shrinking number of deaths due to heat on the subcontinent and a number of interventions that could further reduce vulnerability. “We’re not going to die for your narrative,” he said. And if your conception of adaptation is just air-conditioning, with all the energy complications that brings, the South Asia heat wave suggests a broader spectrum of response, beginning with simple awareness. “The most obvious thing apart from the heat itself has been the reaction to the heat, which is quite unprecedented,” Pillai said. “It was a media maelstrom, in the sense that every newspaper had at least a couple of op-eds. The TV news picked it up.” “I think in terms of providing some kind of warning of heat and just public awareness and messaging around that from the government — that’s improved,” Dr. Singh agreed, referring to “people going to specifically low-income settlements and telling them that you need to stay out of the heat and all of that.” “The public conversation around heat — typically, in India, at least earlier years and even earlier decades — used to be that we are Indians, we know heat, we know how to deal with heat,” she said. “But that kind of bravado — false bravado, I think — has changed this year. The problem is, that only gets you so far. You can cope with it. You can maybe protect yourself, if you have the means to. But if you are living in a house that has no cooling and you have to go outdoors to work, there’s not much that warning can do.” The available tools are familiar across the subcontinent: schedule shifting for those who can do so; different diet and drinks and, of course, regular hydration; lighter clothing; simple ways of cooling the home with wet sheets. But at the scale of policy intervention, the response is still lacking, said Dr. Singh, who mentioned both short-term interventions, like widespread behavioral and labor changes during episodes of extreme heat, and longer-term ones, like revisions to building codes and urban planning. After the 2015 heat waves, India embraced the goal of what are called heat action plans, at both the national and local levels. But many of those remain unenforced or undeveloped, depending on the region and municipality. “The country currently has no adaptation or resilience plan for heat right now. There is nothing on paper,” Somvanshi said. “We have a document which talks about emergency response, which is very different than trying to adapt and become resilient.” Fourth, the world’s hottest countries may be less vulnerable to heat, relatively speaking, than simple heuristics suggest. In recent decades, the deadliest heat waves have been not in the hottest countries but those less familiar with heat — those 2003 and 2010 heat waves in Europe, for instance, where extreme temperatures met populations unaccustomed to dealing with them. This is probably not a coincidence. Matthew Huber at Purdue is among the world’s leading authorities on heat stress and heat mortality — it was his 2010 paper, co-authored with Steven Sherwood, that introduced the idea of that upper limit of human survivability. But in thinking about heat vulnerability, he said, it is a mistake to assume that all places are equally at risk in the face of equal temperatures. That’s because much of the equatorial band of the planet is already “acclimatized” — both culturally and, to some degree, physically — to temperatures that would in the northern latitudes produce widespread heat mortality. Unfortunately, he said, much of the scientific literature on these questions doesn’t deal with acclimatization sufficiently, drawing on research conducted in places without much experience of extreme heat. “The problem is, when you go and look at the database, it’s Northern Europe, Canada,” he said. “In Africa, it’s just South Africa. Nothing in China. Nothing in India, I don’t think. Most of the places that actually experience heat stress aren’t in the heat database. There’s a lot of studies that are using this database and the correlations that come out of it to generalize. And those are almost certainly very wrong, because none of these are people who are acclimated to heat stress.” That means we can’t make easy generalizations about how people in different places with different levels of experience with heat will handle an extreme event — and we probably underestimate resilience in the hottest parts of the world. And fifth, heat beyond the limit of human survivability may be farther off than headlines have suggested. The wet-bulb temperatures in South Asia this spring have been called “unsurvivable.” But in a lot of coverage, the complexities and nuances of wet-bulb measures are lost, Huber said. To begin with, there are two ways of calculating those figures, yielding slightly different figures and implying somewhat different warning points. More significantly, those calculating wet-bulb temperatures using simplified calculators often input daily averages for both heat and humidity, though averages misrepresent the way each changes over the course of the day, in part in response to each other, since variations in heat and humidity typically counteract each other over the course of the day. The result is wet-bulb figures that seem scarier than conditions on the ground really warrant. Sometimes, the daily maximums are used to make a calculation, which yields an especially extreme and misleading picture: Since heat and humidity counteract each other, it is almost never the case that peaks will be reached simultaneously, and simply inaccurate to use a calculation based on maximum readings to suggest a continuous wet-bulb level for any period. And while media reports may take a brief wet-bulb peak and compare it with a six-hour threshold, the length of time truly matters. “If it’s just an hour or two or three, the effects on people are not going to be particularly big,” Huber said. “I mean, you can hang out in an oven for 15 minutes without dying.” Which brings us to the caveats: Death is not the only measure of suffering when it comes to heat, and mortality data, while important, tells only a partial story. This spring, wheat yields were reduced in India between 10 percent and 15 percent, according to official estimates; in Pakistan, the effect was similar. In certain regions, the impact was as big as 30 percent. Livestock died. Infrastructure suffered, including a bridge in Pakistan that collapsed when heat caused glacial melt that caused a flood. There were widespread blackouts and electricity shortages across the subcontinent, triggered in part by the additional demand from those privileged enough to afford some kind of cooling. School days were shortened and in some places, schools closed. “We are witnessing something that people cannot cope with, even at the present level of global warming,” said Fahad Saeed of Climate Analytics, who is based in Islamabad, Pakistan. He mentioned the scrambled weather patterns: One year heat and drought, and the next, flooding. In some years there were even biblical locust swarms, as in the summer of 2020, with 10 billion locusts descending on South Asia and eating up its cropland, 8,000 times more locusts than normal. He mentioned people he’d seen abandon their fast during Ramadan because the practice was too difficult to sustain in periods of such intense heat. And he mentioned a farmer he’d visited recently, who’d decided to not even bother to plant three-quarters of his land, given the weather conditions. What would happen if the world crossed the 1.5 degree Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) global warming threshold, Saeed asked, shaking his head. “Anything beyond that? It would even be more devastating.”

• Solid Waste Management and Circular Economy

How single-use plastics ban in India will impact health, environment

On the first day of July India’s nationwide ban on single-use plastics comes into effect. The move is aimed at combating the worsening environmental pollution in the country of 1.39 billion people. With the order, 19 items of single-use plastics that have low utility and a high potential to become litter will be phased out. These items include earbuds with plastic sticks, plastic sticks for balloons, plastic flags, candy sticks, ice-cream sticks, polystyrene (Thermocol) for decoration, plastic plates, cups, glasses, cutlery such as forks, spoons, knives, straws, trays, wrapping or packing films around sweet boxes, invitation cards, cigarette packets, plastic or PVC banners less than 100 micron, stirrers. The ban makes these items illegal to sell, produce, import, stock or distribute. Thousands of other plastic products such as plastic bottles, are not covered by the ban. Plastic manufacturers had appealed to the Indian government to delay the ban, citing inflation and potential job losses. Even firms dealing with food and beverages had lobbied for straws to be exempted from the ban arguing they did not get adequate time to prepare for the restriction. PLASTIC WASTE In India, the world’s second-most populous country, plastic waste has become a significant source of pollution. The rapid economic growth and the increasing demand for goods that come with single-use plastic products are making things worse. According to India’s federal environment minister Bhupender Yadav, India is generating 3.5 million tonnes of plastic waste annually and the per capita plastic waste generation has almost doubled over the last five years. India lacks an organised system for managing plastic waste, which is precisely the reason behind widespread littering across the country’s villages, towns and cities. Heaps of plastic goods eventually choke drains and rivers and often find their way into the oceans. It has also become a reason for animal deaths across the country. Some estimates say almost 15 percent of plastic is burnt, which emits hazardous chemicals such as dioxins, furans, mercury and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) into the atmosphere, thus endangering the lives of animals and plants. Apart from this, the burning of plastic contributes significantly to air pollution and primarily exposes residents living close to the dumpsites to a greater risk of getting respiratory ailments and cancer. DOUBTS OVER IMPLEMENTATION Though people hail the government’s move and say the ban is a definite boost, enforcing it across the country is a real challenge for authorities. Rouf Ahmad, a resident of the northern Indian city of Chandigarh said the ban is a “good beginning, but its success will depend much on how perfectly it is implemented.” “Even in the past, we have seen the employees from the local municipal bodies doing the market checks and then seizing the polythene bags occasionally. But that proved less effective as vendors and shopkeepers continued to sell their commodities in the new polythene bags procured freely from the market,” Ahmad said. The government this time has decided to set up control rooms to check any illegal use, sale and distribution of single-use plastic products. In the Indian capital city, the Delhi Pollution Control Committee (DPCC) has set up a control room for the implementation of the ban on single-use plastic items and has said that it will shut down units violating the ban. The Delhi government has constituted at least 48 teams who will ensure the enforcement of the ban on plastic products by conducting surprise inspections across the city. National and state-level control rooms will also be set up and special enforcement teams will be formed for checking the illegal manufacture, import, stocking, distribution, sale and use of banned plastic items. States have been asked to set up border checkpoints to stop the interstate movement of any banned items. IMPACT OF PLASTIC ON HEALTH, ENVIRONMENT According to the United Nations, plastic waste is at epidemic proportions in the world’s oceans, with an estimated 100 million tonnes dumped in the large bodies of water on earth. Scientists studying the marine water bodies have found huge amounts of microplastic in the intestines of deep-dwelling ocean mammals like whales. According to India’s federal ministry of environment the adverse impacts of littered single-use plastic items on both terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, including in the marine environment, is globally recognized. The ministry says addressing pollution due to single-use plastic items has become an important environmental challenge confronting all countries. “Only a minuscule amount of plastics is recycled or destroyed in waste-to-energy facilities. Most end up in landfills, where they can take up to 1,000-plus years to decompose,” argues Bhupender Yadav. “Worse, plastics release toxic substances that leach into the soil and water. As they decompose, plastic breaks down into tiny pieces that eventually become microplastics. Newer research shows the presence of microplastics in soils, freshwater, and even the air we breathe. This is a matter of grave concern.” Scientists are still trying to assess the risks posed by the tiny bits of broken-down plastic, known as microplastics. The almost nonexistent waste management system across India’s burgeoning cities and villages means that much of this waste is not treated and is dumped in landfill sites. It ends up polluting the environment. In addition, thousands of other plastic products like bottles for water or carbonated drinks and juices or bags of chips are not encompassed in the ban. “The fact is that the current ban on single-use plastics is too limited, though it is a critical step to control the menace. We do not need to be warned about the problem. We live it every day,” writes Sunita Narain, a Delhi-based environmentalist and editor of the environmental magazine Down to Earth. “Our cities are littered with non-biodegradable plastic material, and it is greatly adding to environmental stress and degradation. The way ahead is to ensure that ubiquitous plastic items in our daily lives are recycled or disposed of safely.” INNOVATION TO FIND ALTERNATIVES The ban on single-use plastic will encourage ways for innovations to find alternatives. The alternatives will be explored to come up with products that are plant-based and rapidly biodegradable. The need to find replacements is expected to encourage the use of bamboo, paper, or metal straws to replace plastic straws. Even edible straws and spoons such as pasta straws or rice straws or spoons made from multi-grain flour can be used. Plastic shopping bags can be replaced with reusable cloth bags in a bid to cut down on the usage of plastics to improve the earth’s sustainability and public health, experts said.

• Solid Waste Management and Circular Economy

Governments Were Given Credible Warnings about Lockdown Harms but Didn’t Listen

As countries emerge from the Dystopia of lockdown restrictions, there’s growing awareness of the phenomenon of excess deaths, for example in the UK and Australia. On July 8, The Daily Mail (UK) reported that collateral damage of lockdowns is killing 1,000 people per week in England and Wales. There is also rising awareness of government excesses in violating freedoms and liberties. In a global survey of 52,000 people by the Democracy Perceptions Index, in 50 of the 53 countries surveyed, people expressed net agreement (that is, agreement minus disagreement) with the proposition: “their government has gone too far in limiting people’s freedoms.” Authorities and lockdown advocates accuse critics of 20/20 hindsight and insist they did the best they could with limited information in the midst of a once-in-a-century pandemic. Such a revisionist narrative must not be allowed to take hold. The remarkable thing is how much of the collateral damage was predicted quite early into the lockdowns. One can understand why the lockdown, mask and vaccine fanatics want everyone to forget their hatred and demonization of all dissenting voices and demand that the sceptics be removed from the public square. But both in the interests of justice and to avoid a repetition of the criminal mistakes, they must not be allowed to whitewash the past and rewrite history. Existing Scientific Consensus Trashed The belief in public health experts and authorities in their ability to halt a pandemic, and eradicate a respiratory virus through societal interventions defied historical experience, scientific consensus as summarized in a WHO report in October 2019, and existing national pandemic plans in most countries that had taken the trouble to prepare one in advance. The WHO report was foreshadowed in a 2006 study by a Johns Hopkins University team whose final paragraph concluded with this “overriding principle:” “Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics… respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted.” Deferred Screening and Cancelled Operations Instead lockdowns ensured that normal social functioning was maximally disrupted. Their net benefits remain debatable but their massive harms, starting with adverse health outcomes, are the more easily documented. With elective surgeries and routine screenings suspended, many diseases like cancer, diabetes and heart disease that are treatable if caught in time stayed undetected, dramatically escalating the death toll from non-Covid cases. In the UK, 117,000 people on the National Health Service’s (NHS) multi-million-long waiting lists had died by July 2022, almost two-thirds the total Covid toll of 180,000 dead. Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter of Cambridge University said the UK’s weekly toll of 1,000 non-Covid excess deaths could be the “impact of measures against the pandemic and the disruption in healthcare.” Paul Hunter, an infectious disease expert at the University of East Anglia, blamed it on the backlogs for routine treatment and soaring A&E waits. Early in the pandemic, reports from reputable bodies contained graphic and mutually reinforcing warnings about the deadly consequences of severe lockdown measures. On May 29, 2020, Zaria Gorvett reported for the BBC Future program that most Covid deaths would be not from the virus but from the collateral damage inflicted by the various lockdown measures. “Across the globe, patients have reported being denied cancer care, kidney dialysis and urgent transplant surgeries, with sometimes fatal results,” she said. How many of the nearly two million new cancers each year in the US, as also heart, kidney, liver, and pulmonary illnesses, would go undetected for months because routine screenings and appointments were put on hold? Americans at risk from these illnesses numbered 70-80 million. At 1% excess fatality in this group caused by shortages in personnel, supply and equipment resulting from the economic shutdowns, Rob Arnott warned in a RealClearPolitics commentary on March 24, 2020, another 750,000 Americans would die from a policy that was meant to shield the health system but instead had partially crippled it. A report in The Financial Times on April 26, 2020 referenced an internal British government estimate that ultimately, without mitigation, up to 150,000 people in the UK could die prematurely from other conditions because of the Covid-induced lockdown that put on hold huge numbers of screenings and operations. Professor Karol Sikora, a consultant oncologist with the NHS, estimated up to 50,000 more UK deaths from cancer with a six-month lockdown, owing to the pause in health screenings. To add to the public policy insanity, the anti-scientific lockdowns barred people from some healthy lifestyle options like strolling and exercising in open air parks and beaches and instead cooped them up in high-risk environments like homes in high-density living complexes. The Guardian reported on May 9, 2020 that there had been 6,546 more non-Covid-19 deaths at homes across Britain compared with the seasonal five-year average. Mental Health Several early warnings were issued also about the mental health costs of lockdown measures with increased loneliness, mental anxiety and emotional distress at job losses, financial stress and forced family separations. A 2014 study in Social Science and Medicine by Timothy J. Halliday showed that a 1% rise in the unemployment rate raises the risk of dying by 6% over the following year. According to the Federal Reserve’s James Bullard, who supports the Covid-19 shutdown measures as an investment in public health and survival, unemployment could climb to 30%. (US unemployment during the Great Depression was around 25%.) An article published in Lancet Psychiatry on April 15, 2020 cautioned of profound and pervasive fallout on mental health caused by loneliness and anxiety during lockdowns. The Washington Post reported on May 4 warnings from US authorities and experts of an approaching “historic wave” of mental health problems caused by the months-long Covid-19-related “daily doses of death, isolation and fear.” Dr. Mike deBoisblanc from the John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek, California said on May 22: “we’ve seen a year’s worth of suicide attempts in the last four weeks.” Four in 10 British psychiatrists reported “an increase in people needing urgent and emergency mental healthcare – including new patients – in the wake of the lockdown,” with 18-25-year old men having been badly affected by first-time mental health issues. The Royal College of Psychiatrists reported a sixfold increase in suicide attempts by the elderly because of depression and anxiety caused by social isolation during the lockdown. Still in May 2020, Australia’s top mental health experts warned that a lockdown-induced 50 percent jump in suicides could kill ten times as many as the virus. Global Poverty, Hunger, and Starvation A spate of reports from Goldman Sachs, the International Labour Organization, International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and the World Trade Organization warned of dramatic decelerations and contractions in GDP and trade from the pre-pandemic forecasts, with a resulting ballooning of poverty, job losses, and income falls. Of course, from the start it was known that the impact of global shutdowns would be particularly devastating on the poorer countries. On April 9, 2020, Oxfam warned that the lockdown-induced economic crisis could push an extra 400-600 million people into poverty, the first rise in poverty in 30 years. A UN report warned that economic hardship caused by pandemic mitigation measures could cause “hundreds of thousands of additional child deaths in 2020, reversing the last 2 to 3 years of progress in reducing infant mortality.” Across 143 low-income countries, for example, 369 million children who normally relied on school meals for their daily nutritional needs had to find substitutes with schools closed. In the same month, the UN’s World Food Programme warned that disruptions to crop production and food distribution risked famines of “biblical proportions” with the number of people suffering from acute hunger nearly doubling from 135 million to 250 million. A study by the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health warned that infant mortality could increase by 1.2 million, and maternal mortality by 56,700, because of disrupted health services. In May, Professors Jay Bhattacharya and Mikko Packalen estimated the lockdowns’ enduring global economic impact could “end up taking nearly six million young lives in the coming decade” in developing countries. A study in South Africa in the same month feared the lockdowns could kill 29 times more people than it saves. There was a sharp surge in child trafficking in India following lockdowns. Westerners have largely forgotten what “hand-to-mouth” existence means, when the sole breadwinner must earn daily wages to buy food for the family, including young children and elderly parents. With lockdowns for months without end, children were inevitably put at risk of being trafficked into labour bondage, street begging and sexual slavery. Widespread poverty diminishes the state’s capacity to provide adequate nutrition needs of its people and being malnourished makes people more vulnerable to diseases. The lockdowns had the potential to cripple India’s already struggling economy, a BBC report warned on April 3, 2020, ballooning the unemployment crisis, destroying the livelihoods of daily wage workers, forcing thousands of inter-state migrant workers to return home under highly stressful conditions, distressing the agricultural sector, and causing massive food wastage with broken supply lines. With less than 10% of India’s workforce in regular, salaried employment, millions feared that “hunger may kill us before coronavirus.” How exactly, for example, was a manual (non-motorized) rickshawallah meant to earn his daily money to feed his family during a 21-day shutdown? The lockdowns also put women at elevated risk of domestic violence. With two years of lost schooling, children were left unsocialized and far more exposed to viruses against which most would in normal years have acquired immunity. Lockdowns forced 500 million children around the world out of school and more than half of them are in India. Pointing this out on the release of a new report, Dr. Sunita Narain, Director General of the Centre for Science and Environment, said that more than half the world’s additional 115 million people pushed back into extreme poverty live in South Asia. India, she said, was all set to usher in a 375 million-strong “pandemic generation” of children up to age 14 who are likely to suffer long-lasting impacts like increased child mortality, being underweight and stunted, and educational and work-productivity reversals. The last report was dated February 2021 but covered what had happened over 2020. The other reports are mostly from March–May 2020. Furthermore, they are all from reputable institutions, organizations and experts. There is simply no excuse for authorities to have turned a blind eye to this wealth of urgent warnings on the dangers on the lockdown paths. Instead of conducting and publishing rigorous cost-benefit analyses, departments and ministries of health turned into Covid-only bureaus, health ministers acted like Covid ministers, and governments were almost corrupted into single-purpose organizations pursuing Zero Covid. For that monomaniacal devotion to a policy that has brought little lasting health benefit but caused massive health, mental health, civil liberties, social and economic damage, the authors and enforcers of the policy of interventions must be held to account.

• Water Programme

Rainwater harvesting: Delhi’s focus moves from rooftops to public parks and other open spaces

“3424 million litres run-off quantity is the missed potential, which sometimes becomes a liability in the city,” says the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), the Delhi-based pro-environmental think-tank that has long been making a case for rainwater harvesting in parks and open spaces. “If managed efficiently, the run-off can be stored, recharged and moderated during peak rainfall”. Delhi has had a bad water year this summer. Even the “piaos” that many large hearted people set up outside their homes in different parts of the city to distribute water have gone dry this year, The gap between demand and supply has been widening year after year — a fact well known to the Delhi Jal Board. There’s been a continuous war of words over water amongst the states around the national capital, all of which in some way supply water to Delhi. Water from Haryana is carried through two canals, and the water from Uttar Pradesh through the Upper Ganga Canal. The underground water tapped by the DJB is from its Ranney wells and tube wells. Now, as Delhi gets its first drops of rain, there is renewed talk of implementing more rainwater harvesting (RWH) measures and that the government should step in to monitor and evaluate the implementation of the laws and guidelines around rainwater harvesting. (RWH is mandatory for constructions on plots that exceed 100 square meters). But monitoring remains patchy. Many group housing societies and some independent homes are doing it. But many more are not, and have reasons to explain why they feel their investment in RWH systems will only get washed away with the dust that the scanty rain waters take with them. Fortunately, there are diehard fans who strongly believe in RWH. Like Delhi resident Manohar Khushalani, a former director of the National Water Academy at Khadakwasala. Khusalani has installed a water harvesting structure at home, and has been harvesting every drop of rainwater that his house receives for about 20 years now. “I built this in 2003 when my 60 feet deep tube well dried up,” says Prof Khushalani, the author of five books on water and irrigation practices and is now professor at the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology. “I decided to divert all the rainwater that collects on my terrace into this well”. Rainwater harvesting, he adds, is just one way of conserving water. “It is not very difficult, nor is it expensive to harvest rainwater. It can be done easily in group housing societies as well as individually. We just have to be responsible and think about the next generation that will also need water”. One important element when people use rainwater to recharge underground aquifiers is to ensure it is filtered so that it does not contaminate the ground water. For the same reason, water on the roads during the rains should not be used to recharge ground water, he argues. “If rainwater is allowed into a deep well of about 60 feet or more, the soil will filter it automatically,” says Khushalani. The rainwater collected on his terrace flows down a pipe connected to a bore, where after 60 feet, the soil filters the water. Khushalani’s love affair with water conservation and rainwater harvesting has resulted in him talking on the subject from multiple platforms, for he believes Delhi’s water problem can be solved by scientific planning. Courts intervene Rainwater harvesting is mandatory for all new buildings where the rooftop discharge is 10,000 litres or more per day. According to the Delhi Jal Board, water connection will be granted to new houses only when a zonal engineer certifies that the building plans sanctioned by the Municipal Council or the Delhi Development Authority includes the requisite RWH systems. At a time when independent houses are giving way to apartment complexes of varied sizes, bulk water connection is given only when the builder adduces a certificate by the executive engineer or superintending engineer of the area that the building has a functional rainwater harvesting structure installed. Failure to install an RWH system will invite a penalty of 1.5 times the water bill for all properties on 500 square metres or more. But the capital’s affair with rainwater harvesting has been anything but steady. There is a commitment to RWH, complete with guidelines, but there are also many occasions when the courts have had to step in to seek compliance. On June 27th, the Delhi High Court issued notices to various government departments on the basis of a news report highlighting the lack of rainwater harvesting facilities in the capital. The case was heard on July 4th, when the court granted four weeks time to the Centre, Delhi Government and other authorities for filing status reports in the case which will next be heard on July 29th. In January 2019, the National Green Tribunal imposed a cost of Rs 5 lakh each on educational institutions in Delhi that had not installed rainwater harvesting systems in compliance with a November 2017 order directing that these be installed in two months. They even slapped a fine of Rs 5000 each on three officers of the Education Department for failing to comply with orders regarding installation of RWH system. The NGT had also asked the Registrar of Delhi University, among others, to submit a list of educational institutions where the system was not installed or was not functional. During the 2020 monsoon, the Delhi Jal Board incentivised people to set up RWH systems in their homes. All properties on plots over 100 square metres constructed after 2001 must have a functioning rainwater harvesting system, as per its rule. As an incentive, the government provides a partial one time monetary subsidy for the structure and a 10% rebate on the water bill. Architects empanelled with the state government can certify that RWH systems have been installed and are functional, on behalf of builders and owners of plots up to 500 square metres, after which engineering department staff conduct inspections and certify.

• Down To Earth

5.29% population in Pune is poor: Multidimensional Poverty Index

Pune has 5.29 per cent of its population below the poverty line after Mumbai at 3.59 per cent, according to CSE report under the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) category Nagpur recorded 6.72 % of its population under the MPI category. According to the report, Pune has shown good progress in terms of reduction of BPL category percentage in terms of population. The report is the annual publication of the Centre for Science and Environment, and Down To Earth (magazine). The report focuses on climate change, migration, health and food systems. It also covers biodiversity, forest and wildlife, energy, industry, habitat, pollution, waste, agriculture and rural development. The data was shared under the section of Multidimensional Poverty Index in the world which looks at three dimensions of health, education and stand of living and twelve indicators comprising nutrition, school attendance, electricity, maternal health, sanitation, assets, child and adolescent mortality, cooking fuel, housing, years of schooling, drinking water and bank account. The state of Kerala is at the top position in the country with 0.71 per cent of its population below the poverty line, which is the baseline of the MPI index. Richard Mahapatra, managing editor, Down To Earth, said, “This report tries to do justice to both: by making an assessment of whether the promised ‘New India’ will come to pass (in the case of the former). And by documenting and analysing (in the case of the latter) how the planet’s environment has been in the last 50 years.”