BJP governments are incapable of a Beijing-style clean-up. The government would have to apply restrictions on construction and vehicles that would alienate the builder and transport lobbies
Delhi’s air is unhealthy the year round, but in December and January it’s poisonous. When the chief minister, Rekha Gupta, arrived at a smog-filled Arun Jaitley Stadium for a photo-op with Lionel Messi, she was greeted with derisive spectators chanting, “AQI, AQI!” The photo of Messi being given a gift-wrapped cricket bat by Jay Shah as the chief minister looked on summed up the state’s plan for tackling pollution: celebrity circuses.
In the Bharatiya Janata Party’s political idiom, Delhi has a triple-engine sarkar: Narendra Modi’s minions run Delhi’s municipalities, his state government and the Central government are embedded in the nation’s capital. Yoked together and pulling in unison, undistracted by spoilers like Arvind Kejriwal or the Congress, this juggernaut should be doing more than spraying Delhi’s smog with water-sprinklers and half-heartedly pausing construction. The conquest of the capital’s pollution is a good thing in itself, but it’s also a great political prize. If the BJP were to measurably improve Delhi’s air quality, it would have bragging rights to something other than its natural talent for division.
The global precedents are encouraging. London’s pea souper fog was dispelled by concerted government action in the 1950s. After the Great Smog of 1952 killed four thousand people initially, Parliament passed the Clean Air Act of 1956 which banned coal fires, created smoke free zones and regulated the use of coal in factories.
Closer home and closer to our own time, Beijing had become one of the smog capitals of the world by the time the 2008 Summer Olympics were staged there. Emergency measures like traffic shutdowns and the removal of factories mitigated the pollution, but five years later, Beijing was overwhelmed by smog in January 2013. Its AQI hit a high of 755, grounding flights and swamping hospitals with respiratory and cardiovascular emergencies. The government responded by implementing drastic measures to clean the air in the run-up to the 2014 APEC Summit. Xi Jinping saw the political mileage in making the temporarily blue skies of APEC Beijing a permanent feature. By the time of the Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022, Beijing’s clean air days had risen from 13 in 2013 to 300. The lifespan of Beijing’s residents was calculated to have risen by 4.6 years compared to what it would have been had the pollution levels of 2013 remained unchanged….
++++++++++++++++
After the truth-shower 