New Delhi is, once again, surrounded by a toxic, sulfurous haze, and its air quality was recorded as being just about the worst in the world last month.
If you live there, you can sometimes allow yourself to forget this. You can wake up in the morning and, even if the air does not look so good, tell yourself that it is winter — a little fog is only to be expected. However, then you remember the persistent cough, and sinuses that are clogged with dust. Sometimes, your eyes are red enough to make it look like you have not slept a wink.
Is that just the price of living in this thriving megacity of 30 million-plus? After all, this is where all the action is. India grew at 8.2 percent in the third quarter. Perhaps a little bad air is the price Indians have paid for growth that the world envies. They just have to put up with it.
However, it is not necessary for Indians to live this way, and they should not have to. This is a fixable problem, yet one that has never been a priority. That tells us something unpalatable about where India is right now. Perhaps it is growing at more than 8 percent, but if so, that is in spite of the deficiencies of its state and not because of it.
New Delhi’s world-beating pollution is only the most visible, tangible example of this. The reason it continues is because too many authorities are involved — each with their own interests, priorities and incentives. The New Delhi government might be directly responsible to the capital’s people, but those in the states that surround it are not, and it is their farmers whose bonfires of agricultural waste make the city’s air worse. The municipal corporation is in charge of implementing anti-smog measures, but its officials do not see eye-to-eye on the issue with the Delhi state authorities.
Then there is the federal government. It also sits in New Delhi, breathing the same poisoned air as the rest of Indians. However, it has been strangely unwilling to get everyone involved in a room and hammer out a sustainable solution.
For a simple coordination problem of this kind, solutions usually have to come from the top. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has never been shy about centralizing authority when it suits him; surely he should treat this problem the way that the leadership in Beijing treated China’s smog crisis more than a decade ago, or Britain’s parliamentarians did after the Great Smog of London in December 1952.
The Indian government can point to small improvements in air quality averages, but the reality for those who live there is that the air this winter remains bad enough to make them sick. Still, there is no sense of urgency; if anything, the approach is cautious and studied.
This stings — especially when compared to the “airpocalypse” of January 2013 that led the Chinese Communist Party to work out that no matter how effectively it controls the narrative, you cannot hide that millions of city-dwellers are inhaling poisonous black dust all day. So, it acted to fix it. It is almost as if Beijing’s authoritarians are more responsive than the institutions of the world’s largest democracy.
India has always moved forward, short-circuiting its fractured governance architecture, when those in charge have been willing to spend some of their political capital on a problem. By that standard, New Delhi’s leaders, past and present, have been failures. Modi’s popularity could give him a level of authority in the country that is the envy of his peers, but he has proved increasingly reluctant to use it in the service of anything that does not have an immediate electoral payoff. Air pollution evidently does not meet that standard.
Perhaps that is a rare misjudgement. By the standard of demonstrations in India, the occasional rallies in the center of town to protest the unbreathable air are small. However, they should still worry politicians, because they are relatively spontaneous and untainted by party politics.
Issues such as air pollution do not fall neatly along partisan lines, and cannot be blamed on the opposition or history. It affects all sections of society. Even those rich enough to buy air purifiers cannot cower inside all day. It is not a divisive issue; nobody is making pro-pollution arguments.
It is precisely the sort of problem that can make the most apolitical of citizens lose faith in the system. China’s leaders saw that; why can’t India’s? Aspirational urban Indians are the most loyal Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) voters, and they see Modi in particular as the manifestation of competence; how long before their red eyes and dry throats cause them to start questioning that assumption?
Beijing cleaned up its skies, because the alternative would threaten the regime’s legitimacy. Delhi now, even if for naked political self-interest, should have a similar response. This is not an authoritarian country, but one where authority and legitimacy are increasingly concentrated, while accountability is fractured and fragmented. Modi’s ruling BJP has the power to act. Until it does, its voters’ discontent would only grow.
Mihir Sharma is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A senior fellow at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi, he is author of Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy. This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
The Cabinet on Nov. 6 approved a NT$10 billion (US$318.4 million) four-year plan to build tourism infrastructure in mountainous areas and the south. Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰) on Tuesday announced that the Ministry of Transportation and Communications would offer weekday accommodation discounts, birthday specials and other domestic travel incentives beginning next March, aiming to encourage more travel outside the usual weekend and holiday peaks. The government is right to focus on domestic tourism. Although the data appear encouraging on the surface — as total domestic trips are up compared with their pre-COVID-19 pandemic numbers — a closer look tells a different
For more than seven decades, the Chinese Communist Party has claimed to govern Tibet with benevolence and progress. I have seen the truth behind the slogans. I have listened to the silences of monks forbidden to speak of the Dalai Lama, watched the erosion of our language in classrooms, and felt the quiet grief of a people whose prayers are monitored and whose culture is treated as a threat. That is why I will only accept complete independence for Tibet. The so-called “autonomous region” is autonomous in name only. Decisions about religion, education and cultural preservation are made in Beijing, not
I recently watched a panel discussion on Taiwan Talks in which the host rightly asked a critical question: Why is the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC) spearheading a robust global movement to reject China’s ongoing distortion of UN Resolution 2758? While the discussion offered some context, a more penetrating analysis and urgent development was missed. The IPAC action is not merely a political gesture; it is an essential legal and diplomatic countermeasure to China’s escalating and fundamentally baseless campaign to manufacture a claim over Taiwan through the deliberate misinterpretation of a 1971 UN resolution. Since the inauguration of Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) as
In A phone call between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), Xi is reported to have stated that in his view, “Taiwan’s return to China” is to be considered an integral part of the post-World War II international order. Never mind that China under Xi has been trying to undermine the liberal post-war international order by setting up alternative organizations and schemes that are detrimental to freedom and democracy around the world. Its own repression of Tibet, Xinjiang and Hong Kong are vivid examples. The “return to China” is the biggest misnomer: Taiwan has never ever been part
RSS