Air of despondency as South Asia chokes

By Vivek Menezes

Recently, China’s capital  city went on high alert  about its dangerously  deteriorating air quality.  The municipal government in  Beijing immediately clamped  down on unnecessary traffic,  shut down some major highways,  closed all children’s playgrounds  and warned citizens to stay  indoors until the crisis could be  brought under control.

Beijing’s administrative  authorities responded with such  alacrity because the air quality  index had soared to 220, which  is considered to be just one step  below full-scale emergency in that  country.

Here is the kicker. On that  very same day, it was business  as usual in New Delhi, even  though its own air quality index  was hovering at an abysmal 313.  And many other cities across the  subcontinent were even worse,  with Meerut peaking at an almost  unbelievable 440.

All this was just one more lowlight, in an unremitting pageant  of bad news for all of us in South  Asia. There is no getting around  the facts. When it comes to this  most vital category of health – the  literal air that we breathe – our  part of the world performs worst,  right across the board.

Thus, at the very moment of  my writing – noon on November  11 – the worst air quality index of  any city on the planet is in Lahore  (468), followed by New Delhi  (265). Also, in the bottom ten are  Karachi (175), Mumbai (162) and  Dhaka (157).

Subcontinent’s air quality

According to IQAir, the Swiss  technology experts who maintain  the excellent AirVisual real-time  air quality information platform,  amongst the 30 cities with the  worst air quality in the world in  2020, an appalling 20 were in India  alone, along with Manikganj and  Dhaka in Bangladesh and Lahore,  Bawahalpur and Faisalabad in  Pakistan.

Aggregated slightly differently  by country, which takes into account many additional locations  outside the major cities, the IQAir  results are not particularly different. The three worst polluted  in the world are ranked like this:  Bangladesh, Pakistan and India.

It should be noted these awful  findings exist on a continuum,  where very few cities or countries  can legitimately claim they are  doing a good job at managing  air quality. For years, the World  Health Organization has been  warning that over 90% of children in the world are compelled  to breathe air that fails to meet  safety guidelines.

But even by those very poor  standards, air quality is especially  bad – and only getting worse – in  South Asia and the roots of that  problem are exactly the same as  most of our other problems: poor  governance, lack of accountability and the disenfranchisement  and disempowerment of the vast  majority of our citizens.

This is why, on releasing the  World Health Organization data  in 2018, Director-General Dr  Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus  said, “Air pollution threatens us  all, but the poorest and most marginalised people bear the brunt of  the burden”.

“If we do not take urgent action  on air pollution, we will never  come close to achieving sustainable development,” he said. He was being remarkably  polite. In fact, our reality of  murderously toxic air quality  puts the lie to every national  claim to progress and betterment.  What is the point of any soaring  stock exchanges, or burgeoning  imports and exports and rampedup consumer data, if the very act  of breathing is killing us?

Health hazard

Just a few weeks ago in September, the University of Chicago  released its Air Quality of Life  Index, which warned that all  across Bangladesh, India, Nepal  and Pakistan, the average citizen  would live an astonishing 5.6  additional years, if air pollution  was curbed to meet World Health  Organization guidelines.

If the levels of pollution persist  at 2019 levels (actually they have  become significantly worse) the  residents of Delhi and Kolkata  will lose nine years of life expectancy. For Dhaka, that number is  an equally unpalatable 7.7 years. It does not always have to be this  way.

For an example of how to turn  things around, we only have to  look at Beijing. From being the international byword for toxic air at  the turn of the new millennium,  it has brought the situation we