Extreme Pollution: Everybody Knows. But, Where is the Polluters Pay Principle?

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.

https://twitter.com/anniegowen/
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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:

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]