Pollution test! India can learn from China’s experience

Delhi and Agra have been among the world’s top 10 polluted cities since 2010, but after 2014, the number of Indian cities in the pollution list rose from four to seven and now fourteen. The WHO global air pollution report of 2016 named 14 Indian cities among the top 15 pollution hotspots in the world. All 14 cities were industrial towns of north India, five from UP and two each from Bihar, Haryana and Rajasthan. 

Coming to the national Capital, Delhi’s PM 2.5 annual average was 143 micrograms per cubic meter — more than thrice the permissible limit in India and five times that recommended by WHO. During the smog affected winter months of October to February, it was ten times higher than permitted. 

How China cleaned up its act

India here might like to look at China in this regard. In 2015, China dominated the list of the world’s most polluted cities with 27 provinces in the top 50 list. This included Beijing, Tiajin, Henan, Hebei, and Shandong. China opened up public discussion on pollution and also created new laws and standards to curb pollution. 

In 2015, China revamped its monitoring set up and started involving citizens in monitoring. It also added thousands of 2.5 PM pollution measuring facilities with Chinese speed and efficiency, and located them close to industries. It made the results app based, so that anyone could check the pollution in the vicinity of the offending industry anytime, after downloading the mobile app. 

China also cracked down on coal and petcoke, the two most polluting fossil fuels that were identified as the prime offenders. They then forced millions of homes and industries to close coal fired boilers and switch to natural gas. This was difficult to implement as China is a cold country unlike India and depended on coal for domestic heating.

Besides this, China produced 53 per cent of the global aluminum and 50 per cent of the world’s cement (ten times that of India), both of which used petcoke, a high sulfur fossil fuel distillate that with 7,50,000 particles per million is one of the dirtiest fuels on earth. The results of clamping down on coal and petcoke have been spectacular. The pollution level tumbled in the capital city by 54 per cent within two years and reduced by 33 per cent in all other provinces. China expects to bring 330 cities under the permissible limit, three years after Premier Li Keqiang declared war on pollution. 

Grading India’s pollution deterrence 

India by comparison has created an elaborate Graded Response Action Plan (GRAP) strategy in 2016, without having data to prove conclusively the causes of air pollution. The expert committee, looking into the matter, identified crop burning, vehicular traffic, construction dust and large thermal power plants as the key offenders. It helped the polluting industry and the MSME sector stay out of limelight, but reduced the impact of action. 

The CPCB also set up pollution monitoring labs, but mostly located in pollution free areas. Delhi had four of its dozen labs in the green Lutyens zone, while the Noida monitoring station was at the newly-built Sector 125 and the Ghaziabad unit was at Vasundhara, a residential area. In total, CPCB had just 54 monitoring stations in the country and most were away from polluting industrial hubs. Besides the Government mandated that action under GRAP would be taken only when levels were breached (smog started choking) and not all year round. It made the plan toothless.  

India embraces petcoke as China shuns it 

Paradoxically, India has stepped up domestic production and imports of petcoke as China has started clamping down on it. As per May 2018 data issued by the PPAC, domestic production of petcoke rose to 13.9 MMT in 2017-18, against 12.9 MMT last year. Total consumption jumped by 9 per cent to 26.2 MMT. 

India became the biggest importer of US petcoke in 2016 as per a Carnegie Endowment report. It accounted for 22.5 per cent of US petcoke exports, 40 per cent more than the previous year. It stepped in as China reduced its share of US petcoke consumption from 9.4 per cent the previous year, to 6.7 per cent in 2016. Whereas China forced its humongous aluminium and cement industry to change to natural gas, in India the Supreme Court eased the ban on imported petcoke and heavy fuel oil in 2017.  

This, despite the EPCA, appointed by the Court confirming that petcoke contains 17 times more sulfur than coal and 1,380 times more than diesel. 

Whereas technically there is a ban on the use of petcoke in the Delhi NCR area, it is widely in use by the MSME sector in NCR and across north India. Glass, leather, steel casting, chemicals, textile, ceramic industries use it with coal, because it has lower costs and a higher calorific value. As the court permits its use, the industry has stepped up imports that had dipped to 2.18 MMT in 2013-14 by nearly six-fold to 12.3 MMT in 2017-18. As long as petcoke and coal use rise, the GRAP strategy may not reduce toxic pollution. And India’s health bill may be higher than its gains from cheap fossil fuels.

The writer is an author and senior journalist. Views are personal.