Yesterday, ISRO smashed all records by becoming the first to launch 104 satellites into orbit. What you probably didn¡¯t know was that 88 of these satellites will be tuned into us all the time. Weighing less than 5 Kgs, these satellites, known as Doves work in concert with existing satellites to beam down high-resolution images and other data back to Earth.
Several scientists and activists are using this data to map our available resources, as well as air pollution. We live in startling times where in countries like China citizens receive air quality alerts regularly the way the Indian government plans to send out Tsunami alerts. Citizens are encouraged to approach factories and pressure them into not polluting.
Things got so bad, in 2013, the Chinese government pledged $270 Billion to fight pollution and followed it up with an additional $121 Billion. But the government had still failed to meet its 2014 target of reducing the average annual concentration of tiny particulate matter, known as PM2.5 to 5%. It managed only 4%, but at the same time levels of large particulate matter, PM10 increased dramatically to 7.1 per cent.
The Mayor of Beijing was forced to declare his city ¡°unliveable,¡± an unprecedented admission of failure by any Chinese official.
People have already begun buying cleaner air. A National Bureau of Economic Research working paper shows that, on average, Chinese people are willing to pay $5.46 to remove one microgram per cubic meter of pollution out of the air they breathe for five years. 10-15 per cent of households own air purifiers and almost everyone owns a face mask.
Companies importing clean air from the hills of the UK are booming at $115 per bottle of pure air. Clean-air tourism is now a thing, with Chinese flocking to visit parts of the world where the air is still fit to breathe.
Back home in Delhi, already the most polluted city in the world, we are witnessing the biggest health crisis in India today. Eight people die in Delhi every day from pollution. Bengaluru is not very far behind. And not a single Indian city meets our own clean air benchmark set by the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB), leave alone the standards prescribed by the World Health Organization (WHO). Never in the history of India have so many people suffered from respiratory diseases at one time.
It¡¯s no coincidence that we¡¯re also felling?of trees at the fastest rate in history. We have roughly 3 trillion trees left in the world. 35 billion of them are in India. That's 1.2 per cent of the world's green cover for 17 per cent of the world's population. In the last 30 years, we¡¯ve lost 46 per cent of our tree cover, an area that is roughly 70 times the size of Delhi.
Bengaluru is periodically in the news for tree felling. The government is mulling a steel flyover project expected to uproot over 2244 trees, an elevated corridor expected to cost a further 30,000 trees and various other projects that will see Bengaluru lose close to 50,000 trees over the next 2-3 years, all this while adding nearly 2000 polluting vehicles a day to the road. The city is expected to be unliveable in the next 4-5 years.
According to the Indian Institute of Science, to breathe clean air, we need approximately 8 trees per person within close proximity. In Bengaluru, we have 8 people per tree. In Delhi, the numbers are worse. As a land mass, Canada and Brazil have between 8,000 and 9,000 trees per person. In India, it¡¯s less than 30.
The problem is so bad, the Government of India will be the first government in history to pass a law allowing $6 Billion to be spent on creating new forests where none existed before while allowing existing forests to be plundered by a cesspool of resource mafias from timber to precious metals.
Trees aren't just a source of clean air. Each tree provides nearly $100,000 worth of services annually for free, not including the value of its timber or produce. These services include carbon sink, storm water management, air conditioning, etc. Mumbai and Bengaluru alone have spent nearly 5000 Cr. each on building artificial stormwater drains - a service provided for free by nature.
Amazon and Flipkart are full of offers on face masks and air purifiers being sold as ¡°subscriptions¡±. Dettol recently got in on the act with its branded line of face masks.
Delhi is effectively paying to breathe. Within a year, Bengaluru may follow along with other high-risk cities. Expect to shell out between INR 8000 - 10,000 per month, just to breathe through facemasks and maintain our air-purifiers.
We¡¯ve come to accept paying for drinking water already over the last 2 decades. The RO system that's replaced the water well in your house, makes the cost of water over 500 times what it was when your parents were growing up. Similarly, air will be subjected to the laws of demand/supply and the right to breathe clean air will lie with those who can afford it.