Ecologies of Urbanism in India: Metropolitan Civility and Sustainability

3. One Air, Two Interventions: Delhi in the Age of Environment

Introduction September 2010. Delhi slowly creeps towards hosting the Commonwealth Games in October, which will announce its arrival as a world city. China did it with the Olympics in 2008 and now it is Delhi’s turn, albeit on a smaller scale. But not all is well. India’s premier newspaper The Times Of India, which had once run the famous campaign “From Walled City to World City,” has been opposing the Games for some time now, citing various corrupt deals that have led the city to be half-prepared at best. Stadiums with leaky roofs, widespread dengue and other diseases, and inadequately addressed security concerns do not quite make a world-class city. And there is something else worrying the government. A large advertisement in the prominent newspapers of the city seeks to draw the attention of industrial units to something more elusive: In order to reduce the air pollution in city of Delhi in view of forthcoming Common Wealth [sic] Games, Delhi Pollution Control Committee has decided to strictly regulate the operation of Emission Control System by Air Polluting Units. All the industrial units operating in conforming Industrial Areas and Notified Areas for Redevelopment as per MPD 2021 are hereby directed to install/operate air pollution control devices/emission control systems with immediate effect and ensure compliance with the standards stipulated under Environmental Acts/Laws. (Delhi Pollution Control Authority (DPCC) Public Notice, The Indian Express, September 12, 2010) Delhi has been an Air Pollution Control Area since 1987. This advertisement, nearly quarter of a century later, must speak rather poorly of the policy measures that have evolved over this period to clean the city’s air. But 3 One Air, Two Interventions: Delhi in the Age of Environment Awadhendra Sharan 72 Awadhendra Sharan industries are not alone; indeed, they are not even the most significant air polluters, that ignominy being reserved for vehicular pollution, which contributes to nearly two-thirds of the city’s pollution. Much has been done in regard to that too, though critics point to the sheer growth in numbers of vehicles on the roads and the persistent use of diesel in private vehicles which have successfully negated any gains (Rajamani 2007). Implementation failures have been the bane of India, argue the planners and, even more significantly, the Supreme Court (hereafter the court), resulting in this sad state of affairs (Rai and Shafi 1975; Verma 2002). Policies, in this view, have been correct but their impact has been distorted by poor executive action. Political economists, by contrast, point to the new wave of environmentalism as being at the expense of the urban poor, the constitutional imperative for clean air being exclusionary in practice rather than an expression of a politics of care. “For the bourgeois environmentalist,” Amita Baviskar writes, “the ugliness of production must be removed from the city. Smokestack industries, effluent-producing manufacturing units and other aesthetically unpleasant sites that make the city a place of work for millions, should be discreetly tucked away out of sight, polluting some remote rural wasteland. So must workers who labour in these industries be banished out of sight” (Baviskar 2002, 41). Ghertner (this volume) draws attention to cultural politics and aesthetics in the making of the contemporary urban in which the evaluation of a desirable urban environment is framed within a ‘world class city’ fantasy. Gururani (also in this volume) points to the ‘flexible’ regime of planning which makes possible the simultaneous articulation of Delhi’s suburban zone as a frontier zone of neoliberal capitalism and a classic example of ‘problem’ urbanization, that is, low on public infrastructure, high on crime. This is a city, in other words, being made by the middle class in its own image or in the image of a ‘shining’ other—London, New York, Paris, or (increasingly) Shanghai—in which the worlds of the poor have little legal recognition. Rene Vernon (2006), writing specifically about vehicular pollution, echoes their views. Delhi’s vehicular air pollution measures, he suggests, may not have led to human displacements but have certainly led to the displacement of pollution, as those vehicles considered unsuitable for the country’s capital increasingly find their place in the smaller cities. India’s professional middle class, which is engaged in environmental and judicial activism, he suggests, have successfully pressured an oftentimes sluggish state to adopt and One Air, Two Interventions: Delhi in the Age of Environment 73 implement more...