Our cities need some air

It's not rocket science to address how to improve air quality or water supply or traffic system

Alok Tiwari

Delhi’s air quality in winter is something of a cruel annual winter joke on the country in general and people of Delhi in particular. This year, Mumbai has joined the national capital in that misery and infamy. The two megapolises are not alone. Dozens of Indian cities report air quality that would be a matter of shame anywhere in the world. Things are rapidly getting worse. Despite having action plans to improve air quality in cities for years, there is little to show. Some cities, mostly small ones, have reported modest progress on some parameters while many have slipped down. Even where there is progress on paper the experience of citizens is different. Officials go the extra mile to make sure figures come out good. Monitors are installed in neighbourhoods having less population and traffic. On days the figures are particularly bad, the data are simply not uploaded. The vishwaguru obviously doesn’t care much about the air its citizens breathe.

Air quality is just one of the things wrong with our cities. Despite having among highest rates of urbanization in the world, our cities seem to be falling more and more into dysfunction. There is too much emphasis on ‘development’, which mostly means building more flyovers and flashy buildings, but they contribute very little to quality of life. It can be argued that such development results in degradation of that quality.

On practically every parameter, Indian cities seem to be groaning and collapsing under their own weight. New flyovers somehow end up causing more traffic jams, not less. There is less green cover and more water shortage each year. I do not know of any Indian city, possibly with exception of Delhi in the last few years, that has added a significant water body. On the other hand, many existing lakes, ponds, and wetlands have been lost to ‘development’. There are more concrete roads everywhere but building them has destroyed drainage, resulting in severe flooding. As cities across the world take up strategies to cope with extreme climate events, our cities seem to be trying very hard to increase their vulnerability to them, be it extreme heat or rainfall.

Here is a little experiment you can do yourself. Regardless of where you live, you may find doing anything ‘right’ a struggle. For example, try walking on a footpath (if one exists) in any busy area. You will find them full of encroachments, open drains, parked vehicles, or having severe ups and downs if not broken altogether and you will be forced to walk on the main carriageway. Or try keeping lane discipline while driving. You will find it near impossible in most places, being obstructed by crisscrossing slow moving traffic, wrongly parked vehicles, people driving wrong side, buses halting in the middle of the road, or dogs, cattle, pigs going across.

Much of the urban woes boils down to having poor enforcement. We may be having very good rules, but we falter at implementation. Authorities say they are overwhelmed by the demands on them while citizenry is not amenable to any kind of discipline. The national ‘chalta hai’ tendency is on full display in our urban centres. The rules are enforced a little bit only in VIP areas and that too in a manner that would not trouble the VIPs. If VIPs decide to violate norms, God save the one who questions them. The result is complete lack of direction. Municipalities are mostly bankrupt, having no source of income that they control. Officials who run the city often come on short duration postings. They are personally very well looked after and have no stake in well-being of others. Citizens have no say in running their neighbourhoods. The rich and powerful are able get away with anything. So, we have a huge swanky expressway that will take you from Nagpur to Mumbai in hours, but you will spend another five hours just getting home from Mumbai’s outskirts to your home.

Our cities need holistic healing, what they are getting is Band-Aid solutions. Things are being done in bits and pieces and in a disjointed manner without any vision. Many tier-2 cities are thus building Metro systems that do little to meet the transport needs of their people. Neither are those systems extensive enough to make sense, nor are they accompanied with any real plan to cut down on private transport. Mostly it is one or two corridors that still leave people to walk long distance or hire autos. In smaller cities it just makes better sense to use one’s own vehicle. So, while Metros get built, the number of scooters and cars also keep going up. I fear as years pass and the Metro systems continue to incur huge losses, they might gobble up resources from other essential works or just shut down taking with them thousands of crores worth of investment.

It's not rocket science to address how to improve air quality or water supply or traffic system. Other nations have faced these and addressed them with determination and commitment resulting in discernible improvement in everyday life of their people. Students of architecture and environmental science learn these solutions in our own colleges. It boils down to very few steps. Implement policies that encourage public transport, crack down on polluting industries, have more green areas, preserve and enlarge water bodies, make cities pedestrian and bicycle friendly. Sounds simple but doing them means taking on some powerful vested interests, be it politicians eyeing chunks of prime land, builders destroying lakes, shopkeepers encroaching on footpaths, slumdwellers sabotaging water supply systems, or drivers disobeying traffic rules. That’s where our cities fail. That’s where our country is failing.

This column was published in Lokmat Times on Nov 12, 2023