Parsa Venkateshwar Rao Jr | Air gets too toxic to breathe: Whose problem is it really?

Delhi’s Central Pollution Board, the Committee for Air Quality Management for the National Capital Region and Adjoining Areas and the Central government’s Air Quality Early Warning System in Delhi have got into action as the national capital’s Air Quality Index moved into the “severe” category when it crossed the 400 mark -- it was 433 on Tuesday -- and invoked Stage 4 of the Graded Response Action Plan, shuffling from GRAP-3 to GRAP-4, which placed greater restrictions on construction and traffic movement of vehicles, especially those running on old petrol and diesel cars. The Delhi-NCR area’s 33 million-plus people are supposed to be going through the thickening fog of pollution like zombies even as various government organisations take the necessary emergency measures till the summer arrives, and winter is left far behind. But there are sections of people, the more informed ones, the relatively better-off ones, to sit up and think of the issue, and what lies behind air pollution, cold waves, heat waves, and floods --climate change -- and make it the matter of public concern it is, and how collective action through wider public consultations and people’s involvement is, to use the cliché, the need of the hour. Issues like air pollution, which also form part of the larger climate change question, have to be part of the people’s mind-space.