You cannot throw more money and men to get a baby out in 9 days
This is not a political problem which a politician can solve.
Five years ago, the air pollution task force of the IIT Alumni Council came up with a ten year plan to solve the aqi challenge in Delhi and NCR. The plan was expected to start showing tangible results in five years and bring the aqi to below 50 in ten years. The plan needed a billion dollars for starters and upto Rs 25,000 cr over ten years.
There were no takers for the plan. The Delhi government was outright corrupt and were working overtime to milk the transport department. Our report did not call for a ban on old vehicles. On the contrary it asked for a ban on fresh loans for liquid fuel vehicles. This was bad news. The politicians were being paid a fortune to ban old vehicles and incentivate new purchases. The traffic police were chasing old cars on a 24/7 basis. They made money on each car they could challan and even better – they could confiscate the car saying it had to be junked but in reality were selling the cars for use elsewhere.
Now five years have passed. The air pollution situation is so bad that it would be prudent to shut the city down and ask people to move out. To make matters worse, pollution on the Yamuna has reached unprecedented levels and ground water has all kinds of toxic materials including uranium.
Does anyone have a magical instant cure. The answer is NO. Does a cure exist. YES. It just needs time and money. We even have an estimate for the time and money – ten years and Rs 25,000 crores.
Is the government going to be able to fix it. If they could, they would have done it by now. This is a technology challenge. Not a media one. It is outright stupid to even suggest that spraying water from electric poles will solve pollution. Many hotels have installed water scrubbers and are able to guarantee a aqi below 50 within the hotel premises. But the same principle and equipment will not work to purify a space which is a billion times as large.
It is also now reasonably clear that the pollution is not caused by new pollutants but by new patterns in the air flow above the city. A lot of the PM2.5 comes from wet construction at site using cement. And the concrete jungle that has come up in noida and Gurgaon is creating a heat shield which locks the pollution within. You need aided convection to correct this. You also need to ban vertical construction in Gurgaon and greater noida (southern side) and replace this with low height traditional construction based on lime plaster and mud bricks.
DLF by themselves have done more harm to the aqi of delhi than any builder could have in say Mumbai. A concentrated dense concrete jungle with glass curtains in a 50 sqkm area is all you need to disrupt air flow. Eventually it will also attract heavy rains – starving the aravallis of rain and flooding Gurgaon. Finally Gurgaon will become a permanent lake bringing all the buildings down.