How to end pollution

Context: An independent Environmental Protection Agency is required to build scientific and technical capacity for controlling pollution.

What are the sources of pollution?

• Sources:
• Seasonal sources: crop-burning and fireworks grab attention at this time of year.
• According to a study by Chandra Venkataraman of IIT-Mumbai and other scientists, the biggest sources nationally are cooking fires, coal-fired power plants, various industries, crop residue burning, and construction and road dust.
• Cooking fires: Since particles diffuse with the air and are carried by winds, they do not stay in kitchens; they contribute to pollution throughout the country.

What are the challenges in handling pollution?

• Investment not profitable in technological changes: Although it is hugely beneficial for the country as a whole but is not privately profitable at present.
• The judiciary: It does not have even the few scientific and technical staff available to our under-funded pollution control boards;
  • it has no capacity to conduct pollution monitoring or scientific studies or even evaluate the results.

What are the steps needed to be taken?

• Deal with pollution firmly and gradually: If this is done, it can be brought down to developed-country levels within a few years.
• Reason: there are many sources of pollution and it would be ridiculously costly to stop them or even significantly reduce them all at once.
• Replacement of existing technologies: Smoky firewood, dung and crop residues that are burnt in kitchens all over rural India and some urban slums must be replaced with LPG, induction stoves, and other electric cooking appliances.
• Old coal power plants must be closed and replaced with wind and solar power and batteries or other forms of energy storage, while newer plants must install new pollution control equipment.
• Other industries that use coal will have to gradually switch over to cleaner fuel sources such as gas or hydrogen.
• Farmers will have to switch crops or adopt alternative methods of residue management.
• Diesel and petrol vehicles must gradually be replaced by electric or hydrogen fuel cell vehicles running on power generated from renewables.
• Tax and subsidies: It is easy for governments to make clean investments more profitable and dirty investments less profitable.
  • All that needs to be done is to tax polluting activities and subsidise clean investments.
• Environmental Protection Agency: The EPA can announce that they will raise the pollution fees by a certain percentage every year. This gives businesses time to adjust; they will then find it profitable to make new investments in non-polluting technologies.
• For example, a fee on plastic production at refineries, since it is very costly to monitor small producers and retailers of plastic bags; a fee on fly ash or sulphur dioxide emitted by coal power plants, and a fee on coal use, a fee on diesel at refineries, etc.
• The EPA has to be given some independence:
• A head appointed for a five-year term removable only by impeachment.
• A guaranteed budget funded by a small percentage tax on all industries.
• Autonomy to hire staff.
• Set pollution fees after justification through scientific studies.
• The PM Ujjwala Yojna that increased LPG access has made a big difference to the pollution from cooking fires.
• The BS-VI regulations will reduce vehicular pollution over the next decade.

Way forward

• We need the scientific and technical capacity that only a securely funded independent EPA can bring to shrink pollution down to nothing.