Pollution on rise, vehicles to blame

India’s growing obsession with vehicles and failure to develop roads has increased air pollution in most cities, the country’s pollution watchdog has revealed, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: May 13, 2010, 01:17:25 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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India’s growing obsession with vehicles and failure to develop roads has increased air pollution in most cities, the country’s pollution watchdog has revealed.

In the past two decades, the roads’ carrying capacity increased by less than 2.5 per cent, whereas the number of vehicles grew at annual rate of over 10 per cent. In 2008, India’s 12 million vehicles were plying on the 3.5 million km road network.

For people, its visible impact was increased congestion on roads, but what one didn’t see was higher air pollution. “Vehicles in major cities estimated to account for 70 per cent of carbon monoxide, 50 per cent of hydrocarbons and 30 per cent of suspended particulate matter of the total pollution load of these cities,” the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) said in its report on Wednesday. Four metros and cities such as Bangalore, Hyderabad and Kanpur are among the worst affected.

The report said that high concentration of pollutants cause lung cancer and asthma, besides routine breathing problems.

The sudden jump in air pollution is a recent phenomenon with CPCB finding that half of two-wheelers and cars running of Indian roads have been registered in the last five to seven years. The growth phenomenon in case of heavy vehicles has been less impressive.

The new vehicles, however, are not the sole cause of air pollution. The CPCB said vehicles older than 10 years caused 60 per cent of vehicular air pollution. And, the reason is poor maintenance and no norms in India for expiry of a vehicle, especially the private ones. Adulteration of fuel has been stated as another reason for high vehicular pollution.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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