Thoughts during COP21
As government leaders from all over
the world exchange pleasantries and present sombre talks in Paris COP21 meet in
the West, some grim pictures were coughed up, literally, from the East. From
Beijing we got “Beijing smog reaches over 25 times safe levels, factories
shut | AFP | Dec 2, 2015, 04.29 AM | Beijing
ordered hundreds of factories to shut and allowed children to skip school as
choking smog reached over 25 times safe levels on Tuesday... ” And as we
know the Eastern “Super Powers” are always competing, we got some befitting
reply from Delhi too. We show some
pieces of screenshots arranged which were taken on morning 02 Dec 2015 in the
left.
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| https://twitter.com/anniegowen/ status/583128509633048577 |
Now, that is repelling. Delhi is
already high in global pollution charts, and all the ‘culprit’ man-made
chemicals are abundant there. Don’t blame it on coal power plant only – as some
NGOs sometimes coin it “Dirty Coal” – it is also because of
vehicular pollution [see foot note 1], plainly speaking cars and cars and autos and some
buses too. And there is not only “Dirty Diesel” as some NGOs many times retorted.
Even with “Green”(!) CNG we are having this pollution in Delhi-NCR. Was not CNG
thought to be emitting less Particulate Matters (PM10 & PM2.5 – the deadly
things that go to our lungs and the later permeate in lungs)? Ah, well, it would
have been far worse if we did not have Bharat Stage 4 or CNG or non-leaded petrol,
sure. That might be a dry consolation.
What is the effect? One most likely
effect is a skyrocketing of respiratory diseases. [See foot note 2.] And already in April, that is
before eight months the Indian
Express gave us a tough warning: Leave Delhi, if you care for your kids –
the doctors were prescribing!
Certainly the kids did not make the
city air foul, and so also millions of common hard working majority among 18,000,000
Delhiites, and twice as many in the NCR perhaps, who suffer the burns.
How Delhi moves? When that news came that
doctors are prescribing people to get out of Delhi, a
government website said: there are 8475371 Private vehicles including 2640809
Private cars, 67464 Private Jeeps (not public), 2715297 Scooters, 2861595 Motor
Cycles ... and over and above 356821Public vehicles of which (only) 19694 are
Buses ... excluding fleets roaming
around and coming in from Noida, Gurgaon, Ghaziabad: God save the Capital! If
we take ratio, then for 1 Bus there are 134 Cars and 283 Motor Cycles and
Scooters in Delhi. How “Public Spirited” we are, indeed! Luckily for majority of
the Delhiites sans-auto, there are local trains and also Metro; the latter is taking
more than 2.5 million commuters a day, almost half the number of persons taking
Bus rides each day (4.6 million in 2014).
And while each day millions travel or
even stay at home, they breathe in the foul air. The Times of India on Dec 14,
2015 reported:
“More than half visiting primary healthcare centre suffer from
respiratory disorders. Fever, upper respiratory tract infections
and obstructive airways diseases together accounted for almost 65% of the
patients...” Even persons near the top echelon who can afford AC comfort, and
perhaps In-house Air-Purifiers too, are not spared, as the Hindu reports
on Nov 20, 2015: “Around 68 per cent of Gurgaon officials have shortness of
breath, out of which 57 per cent have below normal lung capacity while 48 per
cent have lung function suggestive of asthma.”
As always, it hurts the poorer people more. Nearly
18 years back a medical study showed Delhi slum dwelling Workers families spent
more than 10 rupees for medicines for every 100 rupees they spent on food! [K.S.Nair in Health and Population
— Perspectives and Issues: 24 (2): 88-98, 2001] now it is
naturally more as medical cost escalated at much higher rate than consumer
price index (CPI). We do not have exact Delhi figures for recent time, but we
have a figure for North India as a whole from a study published in 2015, for
cost of ARI (acute Respiratory Infection). That tells: “Direct cost of ARI was twice as high in private (US$135-$355) as
public (US$54-$120) institutions, 2.5 times higher in tertiary than secondary
institutions, and increased with increasing age. Of all age groups, the median
direct cost of ARI was highest in adults aged > =65 years in private
facilities (US$355) and public facilities (US$120) Among
children aged < 5 years, the median
direct cost of ARI was US$135 in private and US$54 in public institutions.”
[Samuel K
Peasah et al, The cost of acute respiratory
infections in Northern India: a multi-site study, BMC Public Health 2015; 15:330 doi:10.1186/s12889-015-1685-6]
From such average and median figures it is difficult to guess how much is the medical
expenditure load for a specific economic-class of people in Delhi. Samik
Chowdhury of National Institute of Public Finance and Policy presented
a wonderful study on Slum dwellers in the Dec 2009 conference at Delhi ISI –
“Health Shocks and the Urban Poor: A Case Study
of Slums in Delhi”. There it was shown that for events of respiratory trouble
for which a slum dweller had to visit a doctor, each such event cost them rupees
486 (mean), rupees 500 (median). If we choose a simple multiplier 2 for rise in
prices in last 8 years, then it will turn out to be nearly 1000 rupees. They are
spending a lot. They are compelled. But was this due to their fault? But was
this due to their unhygienic practices?
There is a concept of PPP or
Polluters Pay Principle that arose from studies by Pigou, the foremost name in neoclassical
economics. Around 100 years ago in a book he cited an event – a queer one
indeed. How much residents of a smoggy town had to spend more than residents of
clear towns on laundry, for the foul air in the city. In other words it is
regarding the cost shoved on the shoulder of commoners in a city with dirty
industrialisation, which was an “externality” [see foot note 3]. In 2006, the
Government of India, in its National Environment Policy, declared the PPP as:"Impacts of acts of
production and consumption of one party may be visited on third parties who do
not have a direct economic nexus with the original act. Such impacts are termed
“externalities”. If the costs (or benefits) of the externalities are not
re-visited on the party responsible for the original act, the resulting level
of the entire sequence of production or consumption, and externality, is
inefficient. In such a situation, economic efficiency may be restored by making
the perpetrator of the externality bear the cost (or benefit) of the same.// The policy will,
accordingly, promote the internalization of environmental costs, including
through the use of incentives based policy instruments, taking into account the
approach that the polluter should, in principle, bear the cost of pollution,
with due regard to the public interest, and without distorting international
trade and investment."
Surely Delhiites can raise the question: why we should pay
for something not created by us, but rather by the design of our social
economic planners. And those planners are not just government persons. It is
the rule of market economy.
Are you thinking of curtailing the "freedom" of market? Restrict freedom of choice? Thinking of making choices "social" than "personal"?
Foot note 1:
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| From Sarath K. Guttikunda & Rahul Goel: Health impacts of particulate
pollution in a megacity—Delhi, India, Environmental Development 04/2013; 6(1):8–20. DOI: 10.1016/j.envdev.2012.12.002 |
Foot note 2:
Foot note 3: According to the
Manchester Air Pollution Advisory Board: “The total loss for the whole city,
taking the extra cost of fuel and washing materials alone, disregarding the
extra labour involved, and assuming no greater loss for middle-class than for working-class
households (a considerable understatement), works out at over £290,000 a year
for a population of three quarters of a million.” [Muhammad Munir: History and
Evolution of the Polluter Pays Principle: How an Economic Idea became a Legal
Principle? http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2322485]
