Delhi’s Air: Histories, Technologies, Futures

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts

in the School of Human Ecology

By

Prerna Srigyan

MA in Environment and Development

School of Human Ecology

Ambedkar University, Delhi

2014-16

School of Human Ecology Ambedkar University, Delhi New Delhi-110006 (INDIA) Phone: 91-11-23864876

DECLARATION

This is to certify that the dissertation titled ‘Delhi’s Air: Histories,

Technologies, Futures’ submitted by me is in partial fulfillment of the

requirement for the award of the degree of Master of Arts in Environment

and Development at the School of Human Ecology of Ambedkar

University Delhi. This dissertation has not been submitted for the award

of any other degree in this University or any other University and is my

own work.

(Signature) (Prerna Srigyan)

CERTIFICATE

We recommend that this dissertation be placed before the examiners for

evaluation.

Dr Asmita Kabra (Supervisor) Dean (Officiating), SHE

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures

Figure 1. NirvanaBeing's products

Figure 2. Ideal ambient particle distribution (Source: Cao et al, 2013)

Figure 3. NAQI (Source: Final Report on NAQI, CPCB, 2014-15)

Figure 4. Health advisory in NAQI (Source: Final Report on NAQI, CPCB, 2014-15)

Figure 5. Poster of Clean Air Fair

List of Abbreviations

AAP: Aam Aadmi Party

ACS: American Cancer Society

ADB: Asian Development Bank

AIAM: Association of Indian Automobile Manufacturers

AIDS: Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome

AIIMS: All India Institute of Medical Sciences

AQI: Air Quality Index

ARAI: Automotive Research Association of India

ANT: Actor-Network Theory

BJP: Bhartiya Janata Party

CAG: Comptroller and Auditor General of India

CAAQMS: Continuous Ambient Air Quality Monitoring Stations

CAI: Clean Air Initiative

CARB: California Air Resources Board

CNCI: Chittaranjan National Cancer Institute

CNG: Compressed Natural Gas

CO: Carbon Monoxide

CPCB: Central Pollution Control Board

CSE: Centre for Science and Environment

CSIR: Council of Scienctific and Industrial Research

CSL: Central Secretarial Library

CVC: Central Vigilance Commission

CWG: Commonwealth Games

DDA: Delhi Development Authority

DDC: Delhi Dialogue Commission

DPCC: Delhi Pollution Control Committee

DMP: Delhi Master Plan

DTC: Delhi Transport Corporation

EEA: European Environment Agency

EPA: Environment Protection Act 1986

EPCA: Environmental Pollution (Prevention & Control Authority)

EPI: Environment Performance Index

GAIL: Gas Authority of India Limited

GNCTD: Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi

HC: Hydrocarbon

HEI: Health Effects Institute

HEPA: High Efficiency Particulate Filter

IARC: International Agency for Research on Canccer

ICAMP: India-California Air Pollution Mitigation Program

ICMR: Indian Council of Medical Research

IIT: Indian Institute of Technology

IITM: Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology

IMF: International Monetary Fund

INC: Indian National Congress

INTEX-B: Intercontinental Chemical Transport Experiment Phase B

IOCL: Indian Oil Corporation Limited

IPCC: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

IPS: Indian Police Service

ITD: Income Tax Department

ITO: Income Tax Office

JNU: Jawaharlal Nehru University

LCD: Liquid Crystal Display

LED: Light Emitting Diode

LPG: Liquefied Petroleum Gas

LSD: Low-Sulphur Diesel

MAMC: Maulana Azad Medical College

MCD: Municipal Corporation of Delhi

MEF: Ministry of Forests

MLA: Member of Legislative Assembly

MoEFCC: Ministry of Environment, Forests & Climate Change

MoES: Ministry of Earth Sciences

MoH&FW: Ministry of Health & Family Welfare

MoRTH: Ministry of Road Transport & Highways

MoST: Ministry of Surface Transport

MUL: Maruti Udyog Limited

MW: Megawatts

NAQI: National Air Quality Index

NASA: National Aeronautics & Space Administration

NBA: Narmada Bachao Andolan

NCBI: National Centre for Biotechnology Information

NCR: National Capital Region

NCT: National Capital Territory

NEERI: National Environmental Engineering Research Institute

NGO: Non-governmental Organization

NGT: National Green Tribunal

NGTA: National Green Tribunal Act

NOIDA: New Okhla Industrial Development Authority

NOx: Nitrogen Oxides

NO2: Nitrogen Dioxide

ONGC: Oil and Natural Gas Corporation of India

OPD: Out-Patient Department

PAPA: Public Health and Air Pollution in Asia

PAH: Polyaromatic Hydrocarbon

PCC: Pollution Control Committee

PIL: Public Interest Litigation

PM2.5: Particulate Matter of diameter 2.5 microns or less

PSU: Public Sector Undertaking

RO: Reverse Osmosis

RSPM: Respirable Suspended Particulate Matter

RTI: Right to Information

RWA: Residents’ Welfare Association

SAFAR: System of Air Quality and Weather Forecasting And Research

SAARC: South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation

SC: Supreme Court

SHE: School of Human Ecology

SIAM: Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers

SO2: Sulphur Dioxide

SPCB: State Pollution Control Board

SPM: Suspended Particulate Matter

STS: Science and Technology Studies

TELCO: Tata Engineering and Locomotive COmpany

TERI: The Energy and Resources Institute

TSP: Total Suspended Particulates

UK: United Kingdom

ULSD: Ultra-Low Sulphur Diesel

UPA: United Progressive Alliance

UPE: Urban Political Ecology

URJA: United RWAs Joint Action

USA: United States of America

USAID: United States Agency for International Development

US-EPA: United States-Environmental Protection Agency

UV: Ultraviolet

WB: World Bank

WHO: World Health Organization

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to my supervisor, Dr. Rohit Negi for guiding me throughout the course of this dissertation. The constant engagement, encouragement and critical insights have really helped

to give structure and thought to this dissertation. I thank my co-supervisor Dr. Suresh Babu for giving helpful suggestions and for his constant support. I also thank Dr. Praveen Singh for his insights and motivation and Dr. Asmita Kabra for giving me the space and the support to formulate and to present my work. Discussions with PhD scholars of SHE (School of Human

Ecology), seniors, classmates and close friends have been highly fruitful for writing this dissertation. I thank my family for their unflinching support.

Abstract

Urban air is increasingly shaping the city’s futures and its populations. Delhi’s moniker as the ‘world’s most polluted city’ has led to introduction of air quality index & newer technologies to monitor air. These largely techno-scientific, planning and public-health oriented discourses are represented by experts as objective and benefiting everyone. But given the possibilities of options, questions of expertise and technology are also political choices-they might not benefit everyone, right from their conception and implementation. However, this is not the first time Delhi’s air has been a focal point of environmental discourse. In the 1990s, judicial activism and actions by certain civil society groups led to introduction of CNG in Delhi and implementation of an Auto Fuel Policy that advanced Euro/Bharat Stage norms. This dissertation analyzes these discourses as two ‘moments’ in history by integrating frameworks of political ecology and science and technology studies to politicize and historicize the narrative. By examining together the co-production of nature-society and science-society, it uses the notions of ‘expertise’ to comment on the production of techno-scientific knowledge claims advanced in these discourses and their substantiations. To do so, it focuses on interested actors and their articulations (how they represent themselves, other actors and Delhi’s air), points of contestation (controversies and their knowledge claims) of the two moments and analyzes the shift of discourse between the two moments. Before, discussion on Delhi’s air has focused on ‘middle-class environmentalism’ and neoliberalism; this dissertation attempts to analyze these conceptions within the current discourse. As both these notions depend on expertise claims, it argues that expertise is a negotiated outcome arising from interactions between the complex assemblages of state, society and science in both moments. Further, it attempts to show that knowledge claims are circulated across multiple scales and get substantiated depending on several factors apart from their scientific objectivity: presence of certain actors, media discourses, practices that aim to make knowledges commensurable across different contexts, tying it in the notion of ‘anticipatory action’, where uncertain, unpredictable futures are made visible in the present.

I. Introduction

1. Rationale

Delhi’s air has recently become a focal point of public discourse in which the city’s present is being debated with the tropes of its status as the most polluted city in the world, its inhabitants as living in prognosis, overcrowding and congestion, and a ‘cocktail of causes’. Based on these, the city’s future is being negotiated by different actors to provide different prescriptions- the current state government has responded by introducing the odd-even car rationing policy to reduce vehicular pollution (said to be the most offending), restriction on no. of trucks plying inside the city, and a future scheme to vacuum Delhi’s streets; the national government has set multiple air quality monitoring systems and indices (most recent being the National Air Quality Index); the judiciary and the civil society has been instrumental in charting this discourse in popular media . Moreover, conversations on air purifiers (both technological and natural), and air purifying masks as personal interventions are also present. However, Delhi’s Air was also contested in urban politics in the 1990s, with an activist judiciary which led to closure and relocation of polluting industries outside Delhi, adoption of Euro emission standards, and conversion of all autorickshaws into CNG-actions criticized in academic literature and social activists as ‘middle-class environmentalism’ (Baviskar, 2003)

This dissertation hopes to analyze these discourses by integrating the frameworks of political ecology and science & technology studies. The former’s premise is that ‘nature’ and ‘society’ are co-produced through contestations and negotiations (Véron, 2006) and the latter is based on the premise that knowledge (facts, truths, common sense) is socially constructed, i.e. rhetoric and representational practices (e.g. translation, witnessing, ‘awareness’ campaigns, citational networks, personal narratives of expertise) situated in mobilizations and social interactions mediate our epistemologies about nature and everyday life (Choy, 2010; Latour, 2005)This is not to deny reality but to make explicit the configuration of reality (Bickerstaff & Walker, 2003). These two frameworks are conceptually integrated: contestations and negotiations must use knowledge claims to substantiate a problem and be embedded in institutions and processes that perpetuate these claims. Moreover, representational and rhetoric practices involved in contestations also give form and affect to social structures (state-society-power dynamic), rather than pre-conceiving the ‘social’ (Latour, 2005).

Environmental risks, such as air pollution, become interesting phenomena in this integrated background. Not only do people not have equal access to the same quality of air (Graham, 2015), but their ontology presupposes a simplified cause-effect chain between scientific production of facts, their dissemination and appropriation by various state and non-state alliances, and intimate bodily experiences. Further, policies for controlling such risks rest heavily on this assumed chain. Critical studies have dissected different aspects of this chain thoroughly by using the earlier described premises. ‘Expertise’ and ‘technologies of governance’ have been used as analytic tools to understand how modernity and the state-capital nexus rests on deployment of certains forms of knowledge which configure power relations; how non-state alliances and their formulations of knowledge have been employed

as ‘counter-expertise’ that often translate into popular discourses; how conceptions of nation states reflect in environmentalism through materiality of objects ; how the discourse of air itself is mediated across multiple spatial and temporal scales. Further, environmental risks have the characteristic of anticipating the future and governance consider this, which takes into account modelling of risk and future estimates; in turn, influencing present geographies.

This dissertation, thus, aims to position the discourse around Delhi’s along these lines.

2. Conceptual Framework

2.1. Political Ecology

Political ecology is a framework of theories that study how ‘nature’ and ‘society’ are co-produced together. Here, the object-nature, and subject-society are assumed to be in a dialectical relationship-and the effort is to usually problematize the construction of nature as an object and the construction of society as subject, eventually seeing them as hybrid entities. They start with a notion of ‘power’-whether based on Marxist understandings of unequal relations of production and co-production, or post-structuralist (i.e. Foucaldian) understandings of it being distributed amongst various actors and agencies. This larger theory is then applied to particular contexts to analyze flows of natural resources and infrastructures to understand their production and distribution, followed by a critique of capitalism (with it, commodification and neoliberalism) and modernity.

Urban environments have been studied by urban political ecology and have applied this framework along with repertoires from environmental anthropology and urban geography and planning. The city is formulated as a socio-natural artifact produced by urbanization which mobilize land, water and material such as metals and construction materials, constituting an urban metabolism where this process leads to unequal distribution and access on already existing socio-economic inequalities (Erik Swyngedouw, 1996). In this context, seminal studies have focused on infrastructures of water (Kaika, 2003; Loftus & McDonald, 2001; Loftus & Lumsden, 2008; Swyngedouw, 1997), infrastructure crisis (Gandy, 2006), infrastructures that escape the visible limits of the city (Gandy, 2012) , ‘urban natures’ (Heynen, 2003; Robbins & Sharp, 2003) and food (Marvin & Medd, 2006). These studies involve both Global North and South contexts.

In a review of the political ecology literature of the third world, Bryant states it that it emerged from radical development concerns that questioned neo-Malthusian frameworks about population growth and poverty by employing theories of cultural ecology and classical Marxist frameworks that highlighted marginalization of subaltern communities (Bryant, 1998). Further analyses focused on questions of ‘whose environment’ and ‘whose knowledge’ elucidating the practices of these ‘peripheral’ or subaltern communities and examining environmental discourses (Agrawal, 2005; Robbins, 2001). Bryant notes that future directions need to go away from land-centrism and address politics of water and air quality, focus on urban contexts, to organizational attributes of various state and non-state actors and to employ political ecology in linking health, disease and body. Urban political ecology in India has questioned politics of waste (Gidwani & Reddy, 2011; Kaviraj, 1997),

air (Baviskar, 2003; Negi, 2010; Sharan, 2014; Véron, 2006), and studies at the interface of land, water and fire (Karen Coelho, 2013).

Recently, there has been a call for a broader conceptualization of air within the urban political ecology literature. Ten themes are suggested for urban scholars interested in studying air by Graham: for example, the architectures of cities that leaves out poor in congested areas and heat islands that trigger violent weather events; marketing of air in an new ‘neoliberal turn’ that tends to produce isolated domes of clean air excluding others; unequal airscapes (spatial distribution of air) of a city in context of removing polluting production centres to South and Eastern Europe-unequal global and local distribution of air, and manufacturing of air as a weapon to exploit the ‘defenceless of breathing’(Graham, 2015).

Previous authors studying the urban political ecology of air have positioned it as bourgeious environmentalism arising from a middle class-state-judiciary nexus, an urban aesthetic that seeks to drive undesirables such as workers and polluting industries out of the city leading to loss of livelihood of millions of workers (Baviskar, 2003; Véron, 2006). Apart from these, Delhi’s air has also been thoroughly analyzed through its history, leading Sharan to comment that environmental discourses using different vocabularies of pollution, nuisance and congestion have pushed industrial landscapes out of Delhi into its outskirts (Sharan, 2006).

This narrative of bourgeois environmentalism is also critiqued by examining the neoliberal re-ordering of urban space post-industrial relocation due to internal forces within the city (Negi, 2010). This framework thus allows me question issues of power and contestations that are involved in Delhi’s air. Who does discourse on Delhi’s air advantage and who does it exclude? What does it tells us about the practices of, and distribution of power within these actors?

2.2 Science and Technology Studies

STS is a framework to understand how social, economic, and cultural factors shape the production of science and technology, while also commenting on how science and technology produce these relations. They start with a notion of ‘knowledge’, grounded in either Foucaldian analyses that see the deployment of knowledge by state and non-state actors to constitute ‘truths’ through which populations are governed, intimately tying knowledges to government practices; or in Latourian frameworks of actor-network theory, which I discuss below. It then analyzes knowledge claims and controversies to deconstruct the notion that knowledge is objectively produced by showing how agencies of humans and non-humans shape knowledge outcomes. It then critiques prevailing notions of power that are anthropocentric and mean to impart agency to non-humans or position them relatively to humans; or even those notions that focus on ‘assemblages’, calling instead to focus on scientific or technological practices that give rise to such structures which might circulate via multiple scales and actors.

Actor Network Theory is rooted in STS, focusing on the connections between human and non-human entities, to see if these connections give rise to new entities, or ‘hybrids’, that are more than essentially ‘human’ or ‘non-human’, i.e. it doesn’t acknowledge the binary

between subject and object- its not an a-priori consideration. It treats ‘knowledge’ to be neither subjective or objective, but as something that’s being shaped and re-shaped by these hybrids and their associations (Latour, 2005)

Here, the word ‘actor’ implies something that accomplishes or undergoes an act; agency is the power that entities have to change each other through these associations; and networks are another word for these associations. It is with respect to networks that actors come into being in this relational sense. As long as these actors keep interacting, the network would appear as one whole, and as stable. Hence, all entities are treated with equal analytic lens, and any difference between them is something that should be found out with research. This research involves tracing of associations-for example, through participant observation involving in-depth interviews, systematic analysis of documents, images and newspaper reports (Dyke et al., 2012).

ANT focuses on the practice of translation through which these actors get configured into a network. It can be understood as negotiations, calculations and contestations through which an actor is changed. When these have been attempted, then the challenge is to figure what can be said about the classical social entities-for example, issues of class, caste, the state, civil society, the subject, etc- ‘re-assembling the social’, and to position itself in relation to existing literature (Latour, 2005).

This translation has four steps (Callon, 1986): Articulation/Problematization-definition of the nature of a problem by an actor; Interposition-how an actor locks other actors into a network-articulation of the ‘other’; Enrolment-the relations between the actors; and Mobilization-how actors represent the network.

Seminal studies by Callon and Latour use these lenses (which has been conceptualized by them). Callon studied the production of scientific knowledge and its relation to the formation of networks linking both the natural and social with regard to scallop fishing- how three researchers/ scientists ‘translate’ their expertise in such a way so as to re-configure the system of associations between both social (the fishermen, the scientific community) and natural (the scallops or to be more precise their larvae) entities in such a way so as to make their knowledge indispensable (Callon, 1986).

Latour, in his classic article ‘Pasteurization of France’ Latour chose to analyze Pasteur’s scientific work on microbial theory of disease, stating that Pasteurians transformed or revolutionized the make-up of society itself by introducing an agent (the microbe) which had not been considered to be a part of human society before. As exclusive ‘interpreters’ of these microbial populations, to which no one else or any other science had access, they became indispensable to human society, hygiene and science (Latour, 1989). Similarly, Shapin & Schaffer in their book Leviathan and discuss the importance of witnesses and social status ascribed to them as being instrumental in the debate between Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes in the 16th century (on the existence of a vacuum) (Shapin & Schaffer, 1985). Their discussion is carried forward by Haraway who states that witnessing did not only pre-suppose social status but produced a standard of gendered ‘modesty’ where witnesses were expected

to be rational, unbiased observes not feeling squeamish by experiments which often led to deaths of animals, thus constructing the objective, unbiased scientist (Haraway, 1997).

In the Global South, STS studies have focused on production of knowledge in post-colonial societies. For example, Choy discusses how different aspects of Hong Kong (its dolphin, orchids, air and other ‘natures’) are being framed as endangered in handing over of political sovereignty from colonial British administration to China. He discusses how knowledges are articulated by interested actors (such as social activists, experts and the lay public) and the practices that validate these knowledges (Choy, 2011). In a fascinating discussion on air, he discusses how Hong Kong’s air is substantiated as a medical concern and as an index of international comparison by pointing citation networks that rely on both universalizing theories and particular contexts. Expertise, and with it knowledges, he says, are circulated across multiple scales (Choy, 2010).

Other studies point out knowledge controversies that arise when different forms of knowledge (for example, ‘Western’ v. ‘Indian’ science) are contested, negotiated or produced with each other: Pigg analyzes how ‘foreign’, expertise-driven languages about AIDS is socially made to be commensurable with languages of sex and disease in Nepal (Pigg, 2001); Mahony examined a controversy that resulted when IPCC falsely predicted melting of Himalayan glaciers leading to the emergence of another organization that contested this prediction. This illustrated how scientific rationalities and environmental governance can formulate notions of territory critical to the concept of modern nation-state (Mahony, 2013).

Thus, I use this framework to ask questions about the production of knowledge, constitution of expertise and their circulation: how was Delhi’s air substantiated in the 1990s and now? Who was/is considered an expert? Through what vocabularies and concepts was Delhi’ air characterized?

2.3 Contextualizing Delhi: Two ‘Moments’

The above two frameworks are conceptually integrated: contestations and negotiations must use knowledge claims to substantiate a problem and be embedded in institutions and processes that perpetuate these claims. Moreover, representational and rhetoric practices involved in contestations also give form and affect to social structures (state-society-power dynamic), rather than pre-conceiving the ‘social’. Taken together, I use this integrated framework to inform questions on how a narrative about this issue can be constructed. Hence, I look at the environmental history of Delhi through the lens of air, specifically looking at two moments, or windows to place my analysis.

II Research Questions & Methodology

2.1 Research Questions

1. What actors are involved in the discourse of 1990s and now?

2. What is their articulation of themselves and whom do they represent?

3. What are the points of contestations then and now?

4. Has there been a shift in the discourse?

2.2 Methodology

Theoretical insights for this dissertation necessitated an ethnographic inquiry. Since my research questions attempt to situate actors, contestations of knowledge and expertise, and its politics in context of Delhi’s air, ethnography-which assumes that realities of the human condition are accessible to an interested and critical observer by examining economic, cultural, social and political practices- allows one to deploy a toolkit suited to one’s study. Ethnography, or ‘writing about people’, is a descriptive exercise backed by theoretical insights, systematically gathered information and analysis. The aim is to present a grounded, storied reality-i.e., moving between particulars of field, theoretical frameworks, and generating an account that seeks to explain, or problematize the relations between them.

Though classical ethnographic texts are comprehensively informed by long-term presence in the ‘field’, constraints of time, space, and funding might not allow such fieldwork; however, it remains desirable. This study uses fieldwork from a two-month (March-April 2016) period in Delhi in which most observations were carried out, apart from one case of participant observation in December 2015. Also, newspaper and document analysis was an ongoing process.

2.3 Methods

(i) Literature Review

A comprehensive literature review was carried out to position the study at the intersection of urban political ecology (UPE) and science and technology studies (STS). Though this was primarily meant to inform theoretical and conceptual insights, they also became a method, as I used discourses present in the literature on Delhi’s air to posit further questions in resulting discussion and as themes on which in-depth interviews were carried out. This was especially helpful to historicize the narrative-i.e. understand actors and contestations about the 1990s debate were already explicit in the literature.

(ii) Newspaper Analysis

To understand vocabularies and concepts used in air’s discourse and see if there has been a shift in those, newspaper articles of one English daily-Times of India were analyzed for two periods: 1997-8, and 2014-15. Former were accessed as micro-film in Central Secretariat

Library (CSL), Shashtri Bhawan, New Delhi; and latter were accessed via an online archive from Times of India website. These were then compiled into two Excel files and keywords, actors, points of debate and kinds of statements (knowledge claims, normative statements, for example) were noted. In total, 59 articles from 2014-15, and 21 articles from 1997-98 were analyzed.

(iii) Document Analysis

This forms a major source for study as it is through documents-reports, notifications, minutes of meetings, scientific papers, and guidelines-that knowledges get inscribed and codified in a discourse-and are a site for contestations, i.e. actors don’t agree on accuracy, validity, and authority of documents. Documents analyzed were from government organizations (DDA, CPCB, DPCC, Ministry of Health & Family Welfare), transnational organizations (WHO, Clean Air Asia Initiative, ICAMP, PAPA, for example), non-governmental organizations (CSE, Greenpeace), journals (articles about emissions inventory, source apportionment studies, health impacts), government-sponsored studies (for example, IIT Kanpur’s study on Delhi’s air pollution, recently made public on Department of Environment website after one year of deliberation), and documents from other countries (for example, US-EPA guidelines on air quality monitoring, health advisories and AQI). In total, 49 documents were analyzed.

(iv) Analysis of non-textual sources (photographs, maps, posters)

Non-textual sources are used by different actors to symbolically position themselves, for ‘public communication’, to mobilize, and to represent contrasts and comparisons. As Abe has shown (Abe, 2012), materiality of an object-a poster, map, photograph-can serve to outline conceptions about nature based on cultural and historical narratives particular to a place. In following that analysis, I treat objects not as passive inscriptions of conceptions, but in a dialectical relationship with their inscribers-in this discourse, symbolic and non-textual representations speak as much (if not more) than textual ones.

For this study, photographs were taken at events where I did participant and non-participant observation-and were useful in understanding ‘take-away’ articulations that these events wanted to communicate. A useful employment of maps was also attempted, for example, maps showing fires from Haryana and Punjab in newspapers were used to produce knowledges about outside pollutants poisoning Delhi’s air.

Discussions on social media (Facebook and Twitter) could also be thought to serve as quasi-textual sources. They do not articulate ‘expertise’ formally, but are often interesting in how expertise might be interpreted and debated and could be potentially examined for kinds of actors interested in environmental concerns. For example, a Facebook group, ‘Air Quality in Delhi’, has over 7,000 members- newspaper articles, reports and debates about air quality are shared and executed here. I have not carried out a detailed analysis of such discussions but since some of the actors I interviewed regularly expressed their opinions, those discussions did inform conduct of in-depth interviews with them.

(v) Participant and non-participant observation

Participant observation entails a ‘whole-of-body’ experience in which the ethnographer seeks to record experiences arising from observations and bodily senses systematically as data and then critically reflect on them to draw insights and conclusions. This involves participating in practices that the ethnographer’s subject engages in, though from a conscious distance. Non-participant observation is observation without active participation in the subject’s practices. Field-work, however, involves a continuous switch between participant and non-participant observation, and as Madden notes (Madden, 2010), the line between the two blurs, for example, in observing a meeting where one is not an active speaker, or a march where one participates, but from a distance and detached outlook. These observations mainly helped me to understand the current discourse of Delhi’s air.

Following instances of participant and non-participant observation were executed:

(i) Workshop to improve air quality using plants; organized by Swechha, an NGO - December 2015

(ii) ‘March to Save Delhi’s Air’, an event organized by a coalition called ‘Help Delhi Breathe’ - January 2016

(iii) Talk on ‘Air Pollution in Delhi-NCR: Be the change!’ by Jai Dhar Gupta, founder of Nirvana being, a company that sells imported masks, air purifiers and monitors, and member of Help Delhi Breathe- February 2016

(iv) ‘Beating the odds for air pollution in India’, a discussion between experts and journalists, organized by Help Delhi Breathe- April 2016

(v) ‘Conclave on Clean Air Action’, organized by Centre for Science and Environment (CSE)-April 2016-

(vi) ‘Clean Air Fair’, a carnival to campaign for clean air in Delhi and a demonstration of clean air technologies organized by Help Delhi Breathe- April 2016

(vii) Talk on ‘History of Air Quality Management’ by Catherine Witherspoon, consultant on air quality management and former Executive Officer of California Air Resources Board (CARB).

Field notes were compiled from these events and interpreted with respect to research questions-noting actors, their articulations about themselves, their delineation of the problem and whom they claimed to represent. Also noted were points of contestations and knowledge claims related to air quality and management.

(vi) In-depth interviews

In-depth interviews are an instrument to gain a comprehensive understanding of a respondent’s subjectivity. It is a process of trial and error, where one needs to be sensitive to the cultural, social and professional contexts of the interviewees. Almost all sorts of

questions-direct, indirect, loaded, leading, double-barelled are problematic and there is no one correct way to conduct in-depth interviews (Madden, 2013; p. 72). However, there are some basic tenets that can be followed (Spradley, 1979): greetings, ethnographic explanations (nature and purpose of interview), asking ethnographic questions (descriptive, structural, comparative), asymmetrical turn taking (respondent answering), expressing interest (in the topic and respondent’s positionality), expressing ignorance (to keep the respondent interested and elicit responses), repeating , restating and incorporating respondent’s terms (to express learning on part of ethnographer), creating hypothetical situations (to clarify responses), asking friendly questions (to establish familiarity) and taking appropriate leave from the set-up.

Semi-structured, open-ended interviews were carried out with a range of actors. They were pre-arranged, where the respondent was informed about the nature and purpose of the interview beforehand. They followed a conversational style, with me having a list of themes and attempting to ask questions that would elicit positionalities of respondents and give me a sense of their world-views, i.e. how they see themselves and the issue in descriptive, analytical and relational ways. I was asked to elaborate on my project multiple times, and this would have influenced responses. Six in-depth interviews were carried out:

Respondent 1: ‘Sustainability Specialist’ at Swechha India

Respondent 2: Air Pollution Campaigner at Greenpeace India

Respondent 3: Journalist, Times of India, covering air pollution reportage from 2014

Respondent 4: Assistant Professor (research interest-aerosol chemistry and air pollution), School of Environmental Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi

Respondent 5: Founder of a pollution monitoring company, expatriate and ‘air enterpreneur’

Respondent 6: Scientist ‘D’, Air Laboratory, Delhi Pollution Control Committee (DPCC)

(vii) Informal conversations

As opposed to in-depth interviews, informal conversations are more exploratory, are often employed with participant observation, and generally do not reveal the nature of ethnographic project. It is noted that informal conversations are somewhere between a natural, everyday conversation and an instrumentalist conversation where the sole purpose is gathering data (Madden, 2010; p. 65). They help the ethnographer to construct a field, i.e. to get a sense of the actors, networks, and situations in which she might find herself in. Moreover, they help to establish familiarity with respondents who might agree for further in-depth interviews and might reveal articulations that would not otherwise emerge in in-depth interviews where more information is actively elicited from respondents.

Informal conversations occurred throughout fieldwork-mostly with other participants in the above-mentioned events. They also occurred with other people when I went for in-depth interviews-for example, with staff employed by DPCC.

2.5 Biases & Limitations

(i) Since the scale of comparison is different for the two ‘moments’, as the first moment is largely a part of history and the second one is still unfolding, comparison between these windows is limited and preliminary.

(ii) Since this is an ethnographic work, biases could arise both from reflexivity and reactivity. As a researcher and a student, respondents might not give out their perspectives but what they think I should think. Also, presence of notebooks and phone recorder might hinder flow of easy conversations. To overcome this, document analysis, newspaper analysis, and literature review have been used for triangulation.

(iii) No in-depth interviews could be carried about the 1990s.

(iv) The newspaper analysis limited to one English daily and for only one year. Hence, these are used only for noting vocabulary and concepts.

(v) Biased selection of respondents: I could only talk to respondents who agreed to give me an interview; hence some perspectives on the matter are surely lacking.

(vi) Constraints of time prevented the development of a more nuanced work.

III. Results and Discussion

1. Actors: Then and Now

1.1 Network of Actors: Situating Delhi in a larger context

On April 19th, 2016, a large crowd gathered at 6:00 p.m. in Gulmohar Hall, an elegant conference room at India Habitat Centre, New Delhi. Centre for Science & Environment (CSE), a ‘data-driven’, non-governmental organization with its headquarters in New Delhi, had called a ‘public meeting’, titled ‘Our Right to Clean Air’. This public meeting could only be accessed if you showed an invite at a make-shift reception. It was to be a two-day programme with several international experts, particularly from Beijing, giving powerpoint presentations on lessons that Delhi (and India) can learn from other countries in their struggles for clean air and its management. When I entered the meeting, there was no space to sit-rows of chairs from a make-shift stage at the front to the back were full, and some people were still left standing.

Usually, ‘public meetings’ to discuss Delhi’s air quality are not so well-attended, but that day was different. Delhi’s popularly (twice) elected Chief Minister, Arvind Kejriwal, was invited by CSE to remark on the pressing problem of Delhi’s air pollution, to engage with Delhi’s public, i.e., those present at the meeting. In recognition, a line of digital video recorders put by different news channels was put up. I noticed a few familiar faces-I had interviewed some of them, and we nodded at each other in acknowledgement. After Ms. Sunita Narain, director of CSE and Ms. Anumita Royhowdhury, Executive Director, Research & Advocacy had given presentations calling for ‘Enforcement, Enforcement, Enforcement’ , Mr. Kejriwal started speaking, and recorders inscribed his speech. Our mobile phones recorded it, journalists took notes and the crowd swayed with Kejriwal. As soon as his speech ended and he left accompanied by security guards, the video recorders were packed up and a swathe of people left the room. It was followed by two ‘serious’ presentations-one from an air pollution expert from Beijing, and another from an environmental lawyer from London. At the ensuing refreshments, different ‘stakeholders’ talked, exchanged notes and networked.

I present this description of a so-called public meeting to represent the multitude of actors with an ‘active interest’ in Delhi’s air. There were government officials, freelancing technological consultants, designers of app-based air monitoring systems, importers and manufacturers of air purifiers, masks and filters, non-government officials, journalists, expatriates, concerned citizens and a whole category of ‘international experts’ invited by CSE. It is also meant to represent the various practices and acts of production of knowledge and expertise-performativity- by way of presenting ‘lessons from abroad’; inscription- by recording of that knowledge; and witnessing-by ensuring that only invited persons can access the ‘public’ meeting.

These assemblages of multi-scaled, multiple types of experts are not unique-either to air or to Delhi. Global circuits of knowledge are increasingly studied as environmental issues and their interventions are envisioned through transnational alliances and actors. For example, McCann notes in his analysis of the ‘four-pillar drug policy’ in Vancouver, Canada that

global circuits of knowledge were deployed, with the finished policy itself being inserted into that circuit (McCann, 2008). At the same time, controversies emerging from incommensurability and imposition of ‘Western science’ open up avenues for discussions on co-production of territory and expertise, as Mahony finds out with respect to climate change politics in India (Mahony, 2013).

Thus, it becomes important to delineate, at least in a preliminary manner, the scales and types of actors involved in the discourse of Delhi’s air. Who are the actors through which ‘air’ is made explicit, envisioned, imagined, contested, controlled in Delhi? Such an examination also highlights epistemic opposition, i.e. who does not speak for air in Delhi? For this, the first step is locating Delhi in the larger context of air governance and monitoring.

(i) Global: This includes transnational organizations such as World Health Organization (WHO) which has published Air Quality Guidelines since 1987 and identifies sources of pollution, assesses health risks and recommends interventions (WHO, 2005) ; World Bank (WB) publishes reports on loss of value of lives and economic costs of air pollution of India (Lvovsky, 1998). International academic institutions, most importantly Health Effects Institute (HEI), Boston prepares reports on outdoor air pollution and health in developing countries (Health Effects Institute, 2010). All three organizations have affiliated regional associations, initiatives and offices. Yale and Columbia University take out Environmental Protection Index (EPI)-which had caused some controversy in early January in 2014 as it ranked Delhi as the most polluted city. Other kinds of ‘global’ organizations evoked in Delhi’s discourse are US-EPA (Environmental Protection Agency of USA), , European Environment Agency (EEA), and California Air Resources Board (CARB)- mostly to compare either air quality standards or for interventions to reduce air pollution . Further, NASA also carries out emission inventories as part of its INTEX-B program-to gauge the impact of South Asian pollution on US climate (Zhang et al., 2009). These actors have been relevant for both moments of my analysis.

(ii) Regional: Two initiatives appear to be important by no. of reports published. First is Clean Air Asia Initiative (CAI-Asia) established in 2001 by WB, Asian Development Bank (ADB), and USAID, its mission is to ‘promote better air quality and livable cities by translating knowledge into policies and actions’ (CAI Asia, 2010a; CAI-Asia, 2010b). It establishes air pollution as a regional problem by referring to terms such as ‘atmospheric black cloud’ over South Asia, said to impact health, agriculture and climate (CAI-Asia, 2010a). Second is Public Health and Air Pollution (PAPA), an extension of CAI-Asia itself to analyze pollution-health linkages in four ‘representative’ Asian cities, with an aim to form ‘alliances of Asian scientists and air quality officials and their counterparts elsewhere in the world’1. It publishes periodic reports on health risk assessments (Health Effects Institute, 2011; Health Effects Institute, 2005). Also, comparisons to China are the most prevalent in media discourse2,3 as well as in reports of non-government organizations (Greenpeace India,

1 http://www.healtheffects.org/International/Papa-summary.htm 2 http://indianexpress.com/article/cities/delhi/odd-even-odd-even-phase-ii-phase-ii-odd-even-zeng-jinghai-odd-even-not-sustainable-as-a-long-term-measure-in-beijing-zeng-jinghai-2761347/

2016). These regional actors are new, as they enter the discourse mainly in the second moment of my analysis-i.e. 2014-onwards.

(iii) National: The judiciary, particularly the Supreme Court (SC) has played a controversial role to ‘improve’ air quality in Delhi in the past4-this would be discussed later. A horde of ministries at the central level are stakeholders in air quality and accompanying interventions, most importantly Ministry of Environment, Forests & Climate Change (MoEFCC), Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH), Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoH&FW), for example. The framework of monitoring under MoEFCC, CPCB and other SPCBs and PCCs has already been discussed in the Introduction to this dissertation. Medical institutions and associations are also involved in the discourse: individuals from Chittaranjan National Cancer Institute (CNCI), AIIMS, ICMR, MAMC often constitute expert committees (Government of India & Ministry of Environment, 2014). Apart from these, NEERI, TERI, IITs, IITM have also been monitoring air quality. New actors are websites and apps for air quality-these include delhiairquality.info, Sameer app (by CPCB), SAFAR-Air (app by Ministry of Earth Sciences), etc. Greenpeace has emerged as a new actor too, and its role will be discussed later.

(iv) Local: Apart from actors above- GNTCD, and government organizations: Environment Department, Transport Department, MCD, DDA, DPCC, EPCA, CSE, TERI and IIT-Delhi have remained important actors in both moments. New actors to emerge are Greenpeace India, with a campaign #SolutionNotPollution, and a coalition of various types of stakeholders, #HelpDelhiBreathe. Journalists also claim to be indulging in ‘data journalism’, and admit to their role being more than just reportage 5.

It is in this complex network that Delhi’s air finds itself being discussed, debated, contested and managed. The next step is to zoom in actors specific to Delhi: how do these actors problematize Delhi’s air? How do they distinguish themselves differently from other actors and past versions of themselves? Whom do they speak for?

2. Articulations

I use the word ‘articulation’ to consider the ways in which actors position themselves and others in their claims of knowledge and expertise. This use is similar to Callon’s use of words ‘problematization’ (where the researchers define who the entities/ actors are and place them within a particular network) , and ‘interessement’ (where the researchers impose and stabilize their definition of the other actors, shielding them or tearing them away from all other competing definitions/ associations) (Callon, 1986). However, apart from separating them into two different processes, I combine their logics: positioning oneself and other actors into a network and ‘locking them’ into it such that other subjectivities and positionalities are made irrelevant- occur simultaneously. Or, both positioning and locking are co-produced. In that sense, ‘articulation’ is closer to its original use- different auditory organs come together to 3 http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/How-Delhi-can-capitalise-on-China-experience/articleshow/51901367.cms 4 SC, M.C. Mehta v. Union of India and Others, WP 4677 on 7 May 2004; 111(2004)DLT 345 SC 5 In-depth interview with Respondent 3

produce speech. Here, different actors articulate come together to articulate Delhi’s air, and in doing so, produce their claims of expertise. In subsequent paragraphs, I narrate the historical experiences of actors that enable them to make these articulations and politicize them-i.e. Whom did it benefit? Whom did they represent?

(i) Judiciary

In a protracted case M.C. Mehta v. Union of India & Others6, finally decided in May 2004 after being started in 1985, Supreme Court ordered the closure of all polluting/non-conforming industries operating in Delhi in residential or non-conforming areas after 1st August 1990. This was in response to a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) filed by M.C. Mehta, who had earlier won another PIL (and won several in subsequent years), popularly called the Oleum Gas Leak case 7. A leak had occurred in Shriram Food & Fertilizers Ltd. Complex in Delhi, shortly after the Bhopal Gas Leak of 1984, creating widespread panic. One of the first instances of judicial activism occurs here, when the SC looked to Article 32 of the Constitution to evolve ‘creative’ remedial processes and strategies necessary to protect Fundamental Rights of people. As per the Indian Constitution, a fundamental right need not be specifically incorporated in the constitution, but could emanate8 from a named fundamental right such that the exercise of such a right is but an exercise of the named fundamental right (Patil, 2014).

Accordingly, Article 21, which says that ‘no person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty, except according to procedure established by law’, has been liberally interpreted to include all those factors which allow one to enjoy life with human dignity, including right to clean and healthy environment. These provisions of the Constitution allowed the SC to evolve the principle of absolute liability from the principle of strict liability (itself evolved from Rylands v. Fletcher (1868)9 where intention to harm, i.e. mens rea, was difficult to establish-this case established tort law in the UK, and was appropriated in cases for civil liability under tort law in Indian constitution). Environmental offences were initially tried as cases of civil liability, but the Oleum Gas Leak case changed that.

Thus, M.C. v. Union of India and Others had a precedent, with which the judiciary articulated itself as the upholder of fundamental rights of people and evolved ‘creative remedial processes’ to protect them. Simultaneously, PILs, originally used against violations of human rights (e.g. pathetic human conditions), established the right to a speedy trial, legal aid, livelihood, and right against pollution. This is different from the United States or in Canada where activism through courts as been initiated by ‘external’ organizations such as civil society groups and activists (Cassels, 1989). Particularly, PILs can be initiated by any individual on behalf of other individuals and groups. However, judicial activism has been critiqued on the grounds that it formalizes understanding of equality and ignores aspects of social and everyday life, and that it portrays government as an obstacle to human freedom

6 SC, M.C. Mehta v. Union of India and Others, WP 4677 on 7 May 2004; 111(2004)DLT 345 SC 7 M.C. Mehta v. Union of India, (1987) 1 SCC 395 8 Emphasis mine 9 [1868] UKHL 1, (1868) LR 3 HL 330

(Cassels, 1989). With this in mind, it is worthwhile to examine rhetoric employed by the concerned writ petition and by SC for closure of industries.

After an application filed by the Delhi government on 10th December 1999 which stated that closure of industries would lead to loss of livelihood of 7 lakh workers, SC replies:

“Can the Government plead such a justification for violation of law and throw to winds the norms, environments, health and safety or is it possible to help the workers even without violating law if there is a genuine will to do so?”10

Clearly, the court has positioned itself at the intersection of environmental and social justice in its rhetoric, admonishing the state government for a lack of political will. However, as the following quote shows, ‘workers’ and beneficiaries of ‘environment, health and safety’ are talked about differently:

“The growth of illegal manufacturing activity in residential areas has been without any check and hindrance from the authorities... The law abiders are sufferers. All this has happened at the cost of health and decent living the residents of the city violating their constitutional rights enshrined under Article 21…the plea that the observance of law will now have an adverse effect on the industry or the workers cannot be allowed.”11

Thus, residents of the colony as living in conformity with Delhi Master Plan 2001 (DDA, 2007) were to be relieved of the noxious fumes, whereas workers’ were equated solely with livelihood. Further, as Sharan remarks, in his analysis of the same case, ‘environment was narrated as a story of fall…the city once beautiful now an unmanageable conglomeration of commercial and industrial spaces, unauthorized colonies and vast populations’ (Sharan, 2006, p.201). The worker-industry assemblage, seen as one polluting and undesirable whole, was to be moved out of the city.

The judiciary adopted a similar a Though this would be discussed further, it is illuminating here to notice that the court mandated Union government under Section 3 of Environmental Protection Act 198612 to sub-delegate its role and constitute authorities for exercising and performing powers and functions. EPCA comprised of five members in those years: Bhure Lal, Anil Agarwal (Founder and former Director, CSE-now deceased), Jagdish Khattar (Executive director, Maruti Udyog Ltd.) representing Association of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (AIAM) and Kiran Dhingra, then Transport Commissioner of Delhi-NCR. In its reports submitted to SC, EPCA recommended, in 1998, to replace the entire bus fleet running on diesel with CNG and elimination of leaded petrol from Delhi; in 1999, to restrict plying of diesel vehicles in NCR; and in 2001, labelled CNG as an ‘environmentally acceptable’ fuel. The SC continuously referred to EPCA for its orders, though EPCA’s reports were contested by other actors-such as AIAM (now SIAM-Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers) and the state itself-including Union and Central governments, Delhi Transport Corporation, public

10 SC, M.C. Mehta v. Union of India and Others, WP 4677 on 7 May 2004; 111(2004)DLT 345 SC 11 SC, M.C. Mehta v. Union of India and Others, WP 4677 on 7 May 2004; 111(2004)DLT 345 SC 12 http://envfor.nic.in/legis/env/eprotect_act_1986.pdf

sector undertakings (PSUs) such as Indian Oil Corporation (IOCL) and Gas Authority of India Ltd. (GAIL).

The rhetoric employed this time resembled the earlier case in many ways. For example, The Court articulated itself again, by distinguishing itself apart from ‘the authorities’:

‘notwithstanding the enactment of the Environment (Protection) Act 1986, decline in quality of environment continues. This clearly showed a failure on part of the authorities to perform their obligations under the constitutional scheme and the mandate of act’. 13

Also, it also positioned itself apart from automobile industries, aiming to show their ‘self-interest’ in continuing with polluting diesel vehicles. In a court hearing on April 29, 1999 to evaluate AIAM’s objection to EPCA’s report ‘Restriction on the plying of diesel-driven private vehicles in NCR’ which recommended that registration or re-registration of diesel driven light commercial or private vehicles be prohibited with immediate effect14 said, in reply to P. Chidambaram who represented Fiat:

‘If Fiat can sell Euro II compliant cars in Europe, so why is it not conforming to those norms in India…People can’t breathe and you’re asking for more time?...It is only under pressure that Indian manufacturers will work…whether you speak one or two sentences, we will only pass a sentence…’15

However, vocabularies changed. The court articulated a binary between economy (said to be in the hands of automobile manufacturers) and public health:

‘If we have to choose between economy and public health, we will choose public health’16

This time, the Court was not concerned about ‘residents’ of a particular area who were exposed to noxious and poisonous industries operating in their area, it was ‘public’ health and the ‘very right to life of citizens at stake’17. It was not an identifiable polluting source which could be sealed and relocated to make the city beautiful once again according to the rules of the Master Plan, it was an invisible cocktail of fumes, dust, and gases, generated within the city-not by one particular type of industry, but by processes claimed under behemoth terms like ‘urbanization’ and ‘globalization’-beyond zoning and planning, in which everyone was complicit. This reflects into the way an environmental subject is imagined-it is no more a territorially bound entity (resident), but vital life transcending territory, present in all human (and non-human) bodies.

In 2010, the National Green Tribunal Act (NGTA) was passed, establishing the National Green Tribunal (NGT) for ‘effective and expeditious disposal of cases relating to environmental protection and conservation of forests and other natural resources including 13 (Roychowdhury et al., 2006; p.14) 14 (May 13, 1999). ‘Applying the brakes’, Down to Earth, New Delhi, 8(1), p.1 15 (2000). A citizen’s guide to fight air pollution, CSE, New Delhi 16 (May 31, 1999). Down to Earth. 17 (Roychowdhury, et al.; p. 13)

enforcement of any legal right relating to environment and giving relief and compensation for damages to persons and property and for matters connected therewith or incidental thereto’18.

There are three important characteristics of NGT (Amirante, 2012). Firstly, it is not bounded under Code of Civil Procedure, 1908, but is guided by the ‘principles of natural justice’, evolved under Stockholm Declaration, 1972 and Rio Declaration, 1992 and in previous cases. These principles include ‘Polluter Pays Principle’, ‘Precautionary Principle’, ‘Intergenerational Equity’, ‘Absolute Liability principle’, public trust doctrine, and reversal of burden of proof. Though these principles were used by SC in previous cases19,20,21,22; even a National Environmental Tribunal was created in 1995 which constituted the National Environmental Apellate Authority to deal with cases related to environmental impact assessment (it remained largely non-functional and unemployed); it was felt that the technical and legal complexity of environmental matters required ‘at all times, judicial and technical personnel well-versed in environmental laws’ 23

This brings one to the second characteristic of the NGT: its composition reflecting expertise. The Act states that only an erstwhile SC judge or Chief Justice of a High Court can serve as its Chairperson; a judge (former or present) of a High Court can be a ‘judicial member’; ‘expert members’ in scientific-technical advisory role are to hold Master of Science (physical or life sciences) with a Doctorate in Engineering or Technology including fifteen years of practical experience in field of environment and forests in a ‘reputed’ National level institution/fifteen years of administrative experience including five years dealing with environmental concerns in central or state governments or ‘reputed’ national or state institutions 24. An examination of present nine expert members reveals that five fit in the former category, while four represent retired bureaucrats. This also illustrates what the state considers as ‘expertise’: specialized knowledge, hands-on field experience, and strong institutional affiliation.

These experts are to reduce the burden of a stream of PILs directed at the SC which even after creating a PIL filtering office (which is supposed to review incoming ‘flood’ of PILs and prepare case reviews for SC), which takes one to its third characteristic: its vast jurisdiction. Section 14 of the Act states that NGT covers all ‘civil cases where a substantial question relating to the environment or legal right related to environment is involved…mentioned in Schedule1’. Almost all environmental acts legislated in India, apart from Wildlife Protection Act 1972, are included in Schedule 125, perhaps because latter involves criminal liability in form of prison sentence and penalty.

18 http://www.greentribunal.gov.in/history.aspx 19 Vellore Citizens Welfare Forum v. Union of India and Others, AIR 1996 SC 2715 20 T.N. Godavaraman v. Union of India, 2006 (1) SCC 1 21 M.C. Mehta v. Union of India, 1987 (1) SCC 95 22 M.C. Mehta v. Kamal Nath and Others, (1997) 1 SCC 95. 23 A.P. Pollution Control Board v. Nayudu, (1999) 1 S.C.C. 140, 156 (India), http://www.delhi.gov.in/DoIT/DOIT_Pollution/ap-loc.pdf 24 (Government of India, 2010.) 25 http://www.greentribunal.gov.in/Writereaddata/Downloads/NGT-fin.pdf

These three characteristics of the Tribunal have been held to serve the ‘public at large’, and has been greatly appreciated for its access and efficiency (Amirante, 2012). Moreover, in a video clip embedded at the NGT website 26, the Vice President of India articulates that

‘the NGT…is for balanced path towards development…towards bringing environmental democracy…commendable that its orders have balanced environment and sustainable development, deserve to be appreciated…iss zameen ka zarra-zarra sabz hai (every nook and corner of this land is green)’

Vice-President’s opinions seem to resonate with the public discourse which buzzes every time an NGT order is passed related to Delhi’s air pollution.

In November 2014, when NGT banned the plying of vehicles (petrol & diesel; 2,3,4-wheelers, light & heavy, commercial & private) more than 15 years old in Delhi, it evoked a Times of India report highlighting air pollution, previous court orders (including M.C. Mehta v. Union of India and others), and a 1999 EPCA report stating that main air pollution is due to diesel27. It also banned burning any material including tree leaves in open and to ensure compliance, directing NCT and DPCC to create a web-portal where anyone aggrieved can upload photographs and details of locations and directing Delhi Police to constitute a special force to deal with such matters. Further, it directed DPCC to look into the possibility of installing air purifiers at markets and heavy traffic intersections. However, in the next hearing, an interesting statement was uttered:

“Despite the fact that Expert Members are on…Tribunal hearing the matters…in the interest justice, we adopt the approach which is more consultative and provide a leverage for deliberations with the stake holders and the Authorities…”28

Even though NGT was constituted specifically so that judicial and scientific experts can work together to resolve environmental disputes, in practice, it wanted to rely less on scientific expertise. Can this be seen in context with questions on the NGT’s judicial authority?29

Thus, one can note that the ‘environmental turn’ in judiciary (Negi, 2010) has increasingly relied on expertise, with respect to discourse of air pollution in Delhi. It initially referred to DMP-2001 as a legal instrument, later constituting a special expert committee, EPCA, for scientific and technical expertise. In 2010, NGT was constituted which distinguishes itself by providing speedy and efficient disposal of environmental cases with a stable group of expert members-qualifications necessary to be considered an expert are inscribed in the Act itself, legalizing environmental expertise. Whether it sees a trade-off between the two forms of expertise: judicial (recommending deliberative approaches) and scientific, can be a further question to study.

(ii) State:

26 http://www.greentribunal.gov.in/Video_Gallery 27 NGT original application No.21 of 2014; Vardhaman Kaushik Vs. Union of India & Ors 26/11/2014

28 NGT original application No.21 of 2014; Vardhaman Kaushik Vs. Union of India & Ors 28/11/2014

29 http://indianexpress.com/article/cities/delhi/ngt-is-empowered-to-order-govt-for-banning-old-vehicles/

One of my respondents, a Senior Environmental Engineer, in-charge of the Waste Management Cell at DPCC, said about air pollution in Delhi during an informal conversation:

“Ambient air quality in Delhi will not change. Its because of a lot of complex factors… I don’t know how AQI is calculated. But it is very complex…”

Meanwhile, interventions to change ‘ambient air quality’ (outside, or well-mixed air, as opposed to indoor air which is bounded and concentrated) have been imagined and implemented by the state since the conception of Delhi as colonial and post-colonial India’s capital, as Sharan observes throughout his analysis of industrial landscapes involved in pollution and congestion in Delhi from 1934 to 2005. (Sharan, 2006). Concerns of congestion in central Delhi due to industries and factory workers were raised in A.P. Hume’s report ‘Report on the Relief of Congestion in Delhi’30. A new industrial area scheme was proposed to be located along the Najafgarh Road and Patel Road crossings, but old industries did not re-locate here; instead, new industries came up, a point noted in Delhi Master Plan 196231.

This plan envisioned a thorough zoning of Delhi according to ‘urban land-use of industry, commerce, living, playing…to produce smooth functioning and orderliness’ 32. Though zoning was contested when it was being planned, it prevailed in ‘public interest’, ‘providing adequate light, air, protection from fire, etc.’ 33 This plan not only zoned land (and with it, air), it classified industries based on their size, no. of workers, and amount of nuisance they generated. Based on this classification, industries classified as hazardous, polluting, noxious, or simply not belonging to an urban area (such as dairies) were to be moved out of the city. However, as is noted in the articulations of the judiciary, this clearly didn’t go as imagined, and the court reprimanded the state (both Central and State governments) to turn a blind eye to violation of the Master Plan.

In fact, if we only rely on articulations of the judiciary, the state appears to be an obstacle to improvement of environmental conditions, to be put on a noose only by the former. However, Acts and regulations are enacted by the state, and it would be illuminating here to delve into an analysis of arguments offered by it, through its various reports and publications. At various points in the litigation leading to changes in Delhi’s fuel policy in late 1990s, government officials articulated a lack of expertise, even if it had been in the process of implementing Acts and standards since 1981(Air Act in 1981 and CPCB notification of criteria pollutant standards in 1982), and a lack of public pressure as an explanation for non-implementation of its own legislations and regulations34.

It is interesting to note that while the state articulated a lack of public pressure as an obstacle to enacting its own legislations, it had started a campaign in 1988 in Delhi to educate its citizens about dangers of air pollution and to get their vehicles’ tailpipes checked voluntarily for

30 Report on the Relief of Congestion in Delhi’ 31 DDA, Master Plan of Delhi, 1962 32 DDA, Master Plan of Delhi, 1962, p. 7. 33 DDA, Master Plan of Delhi, 1962, p. 44. 34 15 November 1996. ‘We have set up a toothless pollution control board’. Down to Earth

emissions 35. In 1991, then Union Environment Minister (Independent Charge) Maneka Gandhi initiated a drive to get tailpipes checked in 199136. The Delhi traffic police also started a campaign to fine polluting vehicles in 198837. In the same year, the Delhi government also identified polluting industries in Delhi (before any order by SC)38. In 1989, the Central government instituted a penalty of Rs. 1,000 on polluting vehicles under Central Motor Vehicles Act 1989 (In total, sixty penalties are notified under this Act, only one, no. 49 mentions the word ‘pollution)39 .

Finally, in 1990, it enacted Delhi’s Second Master Plan (DMP-2001), which underscored industrial relocation: Hazardous & Noxious Industries (Ha), Heavy & Large Industries (Hb) were to be shifted out in three years to the newly envisioned National Capital Region (NCR)- freed land to be used for light and service industries40. This came five years after M.C. Mehta’s writ petition in SC in 1985 which had appealed for closure of non-conforming and polluting industries and continued in line with the First Master Plan, citing failure of implementation as a reason for non-compliance41. Further litigation would be based on this Plan and its violations.

Also, the plan recognizes the sources of air pollution in Delhi and recommends interventions (before CSE’s campaign against diesel vehicles from 1996):

‘there are around 55,000 industrial units and 6.4 lakh vehicles along with three thermal power stations which jointly make Delhi’s atmosphere polluted…it is recommended that priority should be given to control vehicular pollution by way of reduction of smoke density from buses and other heavy vehicles for bringing the levels of Carbon Monoxide and Hydrocarbon from all petrol vehicles to less than 3% and 100 ppm (parts per million) respectively…thermal power station be fitted with pollution control devices such as electrostatic precipitators’42

Thus, DDA imagines petrol, with its primary pollutants-carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, and ‘smoke’ are articulated as main concerns here, whereas a filtering technology is proposed to control emissions for cleaning Delhi’s air.

In the same document, DDA remarked that:

‘Delhi’s requirement of power in the year 2001 is estimated to be 4000 MW, Delhi may be able to add only a limited capacity to its existing power generation, due to existing air pollution, scarcity of water, and problematic coal transportation. It would have to bank upon sources of supply away from Delhi’43

35 Times of India, September 21, 1988 36 http://www.downtoearth.org.in/indepth/smog-inc-27009 37 Indian Express, February 24, 1988 38 Times of India, February 28, 1988 39 http://bardhaman.nic.in/mv/offences_penalties.pdf 40 DDA, Master Plan of Delhi-2001 (1990), p. 18-20. 41 (Sharan, 2006; p. 202) 42 DDA, Master Plan of Delhi-2001 (1990), p. 60 43 DDA, Master Plan of Delhi-2001 (1990), p. 44.

The above paragraph illustrates that characterization of Delhi’s air as ‘polluted’ transformed into a rationality of sourcing its supply from elsewhere (and outsourcing its pollution). This fit neatly into the DDA’s plan for ‘regional development’ conceptualized in the wake of increasing migration-away from a core city into ‘dynamic satellite cities’ which would serve to strengthen the core44. Stating that main migration is from states of Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan, the Central Government had enacted the National Capital Region Planning Board Act 1985 to develop surrounding areas as well as de-congest Delhi.45 The Plan materialized this by notifying the ‘Delhi Metropolitan Area’ to be considered as one urban agglomeration for planning: including Union Territory of Delhi, Ghaziabad-Loni Complex, NOIDA, Faridabad-Ballabgarh Complex, Gurgaon, Bahadurgarh, Kundli and an extension of Delhi Ridge to Haryana46.

Through an analysis of the Master Plan 2001, we recognize that air pollution was a grave matter of concern to the state, at least in its imagination, and in its characterisation of Delhi’s air as toxic-crucial to a broader agenda of decongesting Delhi in tune with ‘regional development’ of the NCR.

Meanwhile, litigation continued on Delhi’s fuel policy, evoking widely different reactions from government officials. For example, in 1997, Rajendra Gupta, then transport minister of Delhi said: ‘Delhi roads should display a statutory warning47: breathing here is injurious to health’; Saifuddin Soz, the Union minister for environment and forests, issued a White paper on pollution control in Delhi with an action plan in December 199748; and health minister of Delhi, Harsh Vardhan claimed that air pollution was not a serious health problem49.

This was the first legislative assembly of Delhi after its declaration as NCT of Delhi in 1991 by 69th amendment to Indian Constitution50 (although the first assembly elections were held in Delhi in 1952, the States Reorganization Act made Delhi a Union Territory under direct President Rule51) for which elections were held in 1993, the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) emerging as the primary victor, with 42.82% seats52. This government saw three Chief Ministers: Sahib Singh Verma replaced Madan Lal Khurana in 1996-embroiled in a hawala corruption crisis53 , himself substituted by Sushma Swaraj in 1998 following an onion and inflation crisis (the latter was CM for only 52 days). In the 1998 elections to constitute the Second Legislative Assembly, Sheila Dikshit, then chief of the Delhi Pradesh Congress Committee became the Chief Minister. Congress had built its campaign on the provision of

44 DDA, Master Plan of Delhi-2001 (1990), p. 7. 45 DDA, Master Plan of Delhi-2001 (1990), p. 8. 46 DDA, Master Plan of Delhi-2001 (1990), p. 8. 47 (Roychowdhury et al., 2006; p. 5) 48 (Roychowdhury et al., 2006; p. 7) 49 (Roychowdhury et al., 2006; p. 7) 50 69th Amendment to Indian constitution, retrieved from http://indiacode.nic.in/coiweb/amend/amend69.htm 51 October 15, 1955. Reorganization of the states: The Approach and Arrangements. EPW 52 http://eci.nic.in/archive/se98/background/U05/DL-LA93.htm 53 April 3, 1998. Sudha Mahalingam. Diaries as Evidence: Jain Hawala Case. Frontline, Vol. 15, No. 6.

civic amenities in Delhi54, and Sheila Dikshit had signed CSE’s pledge to combat air pollution Delhi55.

Just as the closure of industries revealed political anxieties when an alliance was formed between owners of industries and workers at the behest of communist parties, it also helped the Delhi government to articulate its position. In an interview, Sheila Dikshit said:

“We have suggested to the government that areas where industry exists to an extent of more than 70 per cent ought to be declared industrial areas…asked for a wider definition of "household industry" to broaden its scope…for a change of the Master Plan… passed a Bill for the registration of industries…We would like to have the DDA with us…have law and order with us…The MCD is the agency which has been giving out licences to the factory units…We are concerned about the housing requirements of the working class…You saw how people came out on the streets. This State has reached its economic boom in the last 30 to 40 years. Most of the units now have effluent treatment plants. In any case, I would like to say that Delhi's pollution is not caused by industries but by vehicular pollution….”56

In one stroke, Dikshit legitimizes her government by diffusing accountability, portraying the Master Plan as anti-poor and suggesting an amendment, and says that ‘economic boom’, as replaced one enemy with another: vehicular pollution becomes the main source.

Again, similar concerns were raised with deadline of April 14, 2001 approaching soon, when the entire city bus and city fleet was to either run on CNG or possess certificates from state transport authority 57 or be fined coming closer. In fact, Frontline reported that ‘the last occasion when the city got similarly paralysed was in the wake of the closure of polluting industries and consequent labour unrest’58. Once again, Sheila Dikshit reiterates:

“the court was not aware of the ground realities prevailing in the capital… it took a lenient view of the situation in view of the serious law and order problem that had arisen…the court is being irrational and was taking an indifferent view, by refusing to listen to the government's problems…”59

Here, Dikshit positions the judiciary as being ignorant of ground realities’ and ‘irrational’, and herself as cognizant of the negotiations between various actors. Also, the Delhi government allowed buses possessing CNG conversion booking receipts and photocopies of affidavits to ply without special permits. Dikshit’s tone was sombre; she was ready to ‘face punishment for contempt of court, but would not allow citizens to suffer’60.

However, after April 5, 2002, when SC ordered heavy penalty for continuous plying of diesel buses and autos, undertones changed almost immediately, with an emerging consensus between

54 December 5-18, 1998. A fresh polarisation in Delhi. Venkitesh Ramakrishnan. Frontline, Vol. 15, No. 25 55 (Roychowdhury et al., 2006; p. 8) 56 Dec. 9-22, 2000. ‘We want to amend the Master Plan’. Frontline, Vol. 15, No. 25. 57 (Roychowdhury et al., 2006; p. 21) 58 April 14-27. Commuters’ crisis. Frontline, Vol. 18, No.8 59 April 14-27. Commuters’ crisis. Frontline, Vol. 18, No.8 60 April 4, 2001, Delhi government defies SC order on CNG issue’. The Hindu, New Delhi

Union and Central governments to ensure adequate supply of CNG to Delhi and phasing out of the last diesel bus from Delhi on December 1, 2002, when the entire bus fleet had shifted to CNG61.

This shift was reflected in the 2003 assembly elections. BJP’s Sahib Singh Verma stated that ‘the entire credit for cleaning up Delhi’s air goes to Union petroleum minister Ram Naik’, whereas Ms. Dikshit countered that ‘when other cities of the world were hesitant to implement CNG, they were first to do it…BJP loves to take credit for all good things that have happened in the last five years, but it has only set up hurdles…in 1997, they did nothing when SC ordered measures to improve air quality…we did it, difference in air quality we breathe is clearly visible’. In alignment, Ajay Maken, former transport minister of Delhi government, was labelled ‘Mr. CNG’. The 2003 assembly elections were won by INC, reported to make ‘huge inroads in the sizeable middle class population, used to be solid BJP turf by addressing issues of pollution, congestion and encroachments.’62

Hence, Delhi’s air was thoroughly articulated by the state: Through its Master Plans, it tried to distribute land (and air) in various zones, even relying on its toxicity to expand its regional development schemes; through its responses and positioning of the judiciary, it employed the rhetoric of ‘all-negotiating’ state such that clean air became political capital. As a result, Delhi’s air was transformed from a contested story with multiple actors to a linear narrative in which there were some winners and some losers as articulated by the state: ‘public’ and the state won, whereas the ‘diesel lobby’ lost.

In 2016, Delhi’s air is ‘hot’ again. WHO’s condemnation of Delhi as the world’s most (not fourth or fifth) polluted city, ahead of Beijing in 2014 saw the state roll out two much-discussed, much-maligned interventions: the National Air Quality Index (NAQI) by Narendra Modi-led Union government, and the Odd-Even scheme implemented by Arvind Kejriwal-led state government. Both these governments emerged, again in anti-incumbency waves, when the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) at centre and in Delhi was entangled in a variety of corruption scams in 2010- in housing, allotment of 2G spectrum, explicit lobbying, coal allocation, and the Commonwealth Games 2010, in which Sheila Dikshit was accused by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India . These events helped to solidify grounds for the emergence of the 2011 anti-corruption movement, of which Mr. Kejriwal was a leader.

Mr. Kejriwal’s articulations are built around social activism: in 1999, he founded Parivartan with Manish Sisodia (who is now deputy CM), not a registered NGO, but a ‘people’s organization’ run on individual donations. Parivartan addressed grievances of public distribution system, social welfare schemes and income tax. In 2000, he launched a ‘satyagraha’ outside the Chief Commissioner’s office demanding transparency from the Income Tax Department (ITD). When a state-level RTI was enacted by the then Delhi government in 2001, Parivartan used it to review communications between World Bank and various governmental agencies about a project to privatize the supply of water in Delhi, which

61 (Roychowdhury et al., 2006; p. 32) 62 November 22-December 5, 2003. Advantage Congress (I). Frontline, Vol. 20, No. 24.

would siphon off supply from the city’s urban poor. In 2005, both of them launched an NGO called ‘Kabir’ for activism for Right to Information Act 2005 (RTI) and participatory governance. In 2006, he resigned from his position as the Joint Commissioner of Delhi’s ITD. When the national level RTI was enacted by the union government in 2005, he was recognized as one of its main campaigners, and presented with the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 2006.

These instances enabled Mr. Kejriwal to establish himself as a paragon of honesty, and when the UPA was embroiled in the 2010 Commonwealth Games scam, he wrote an open letter to Ms. Sonia Gandhi, President of INC, demanding the constitution of the ‘Jan Lokpal’, a public ombudsman which would be an impartial, objective, opposed to Central Vigilance Commission (CVC), which cannot take actions against politicians, and to Central Bureau of Investigation-a central body itself 63. His demand for a Jan Lokpal precipitated his involvement in the 2011 anti-India corruption ‘movement’ with two other persons strongly associated with a ‘clean image’: Anna Hazare, a long-standing influential social activist from Maharashtra and Kiran Bedi, first woman to join the Indian Police Service (IPS), with a long history of ‘strict’ actions. Rallies, satyagrahas, and hunger strikes were deployed by the three to demand the Jan Lokpal Bill. However, when critiqued on the grounds that they couldn’t contest elected representatives without a formal political process, they launched a political party-Aam Aamdi Party (AAP) on November 26, 2012.

AAP’s philosophy can be gleaned from an article written by its member Prashant Bhushan in September 2012, who foresees ‘decentralized, participatory democracy…an electoral revolution which sweeps away corrupted mainstream…committed to a different kind of an engagement between state and people…that relies on voluntary participation…and selection of honest candidates’64. Sweeping away corruption became symbolic within AAP, a broom being its election symbol. Consequently, it came second in the Fifth Legislative Elections in 2014 and formed a minority government with external support from eight INC MLAs. However, it resigned after 49 days, citing he couldn’t pass the Jan Lokpal Bill in Delhi Assembly amidst opposition from BJP and INC and Election Commission of India dissolved the assembly after 9 months of governor’s rule. When Assembly elections were held again in 2015, an apology from Kejriwal was broadcast in all possible communication channels: recorded mobile phone calls, social media, on radio and in television news channels. He articulated his former government as naïve, asking people to forgive him and give him a second chance. In an unexpected turn of events in the 6th assembly elections, AAP won sixty-seven out of seventy seats in legislative assembly.

The above discussion is meant to shed light on its various articulations on Delhi’s air. It launched a Delhi Dialogue Commission (DDC) to identify best ideas and practices, and translate them to which posted advertisements for recruitment of a Senior Consultant (environment) for a duration of one-year with a ‘professional degree in engineering, science or economics, with minimum three years working experience in environment management and planning’. Contrast this with the earlier government, who articulated a lack of expertise in the 63 http://www.outlookindia.com/magazine/story/open-letter-to-sonia-gandhi/267215 64 3 September 2012. A Politial Alternative to Alternative Politics. Outlook. Retrieved from http://www.outlookindia.com/magazine/story/a-political-alternative-to-alternative-politics/282060

previous moment on one hand, and the judiciary, which embedded environmental expertise formally.

In a series of tweets on 30 November 2015, it said: ‘time has come for environmentally conscious people of Delhi to put their heads together and come up with solutions for Delhi’s pollution problem’. It had set up an innovation challenge under University of Chicago’s Urban Labs initiative, asking people to submit their ideas and compete. The best idea, it said, would receive a seed funding of Rs. 2 crore from Delhi government and would be scaled up to Delhi. In the Design Delhi challenge, the primary objective was to ‘reduce air pollution’; energy, water and climate change took a backseat65. It was inaugurated by academics, cabinet ministers and civil society representatives66, with winners to be announced in summer 2016.

Meanwhile, it introduced the not-so-innovative Odd and Even scheme, with a ‘trial phase’ to be held from 1 January 2016, something I will discuss later. Private non-commercial vehicles were to ply on alternate days based on their car’s number plate; women, two-wheelers, three-wheelers, all CNG-driven vehicles, hybrid and electric cars, those plying for medical emergency and some government officials were exempted from this scheme67. In preparation, advertisements with Kejriwal’s face and a broom appeared on Delhi’s billboards, buses; messages wee broadcasted again. For fifteen days, the AAP claimed, its volunteers would man Delhi’s roads and book drivers for non-compliance.

(iii) Centre for Science and Environment (CSE):

In its website, CSE clearly articulates its position: ‘a public interest research-based advocacy group that lobbies for sustainable development…we call it knowledge-based activism’68. It sees a rural-urban binary, depicting on one hand, millions of people dependent on ‘biomass-based subsistence economy…with environment as their only natural asset’, and ‘rapid industrialization leading to toxification of cities’ on another. The challenge, then, it says, is to ‘reinvent Western growths models by leapfrogging to technologies’.

Established in 1980 by Anil Agarwal, who ‘gave up a promising technical career to pursue science journalism as a correspondent in Hindustan Times, vowing to note scientific and technological needs of its people’, and joined by Sunita Narain, who had emerged as the leader of the then student body, Kalpvriksh, CSE published its First Citizens’ Report in 1982, enunciating that developing countries need to consider environment and development issues together. In subsequent reports, most prominently on ‘indigenous knowledges’, floods, and Delhi’s story of CNG conversion, CSE established itself as pro-poor, pro-development, pro-science, pro-rationality, pro-social and environmental justice, and anti-bureaucracy.

A brief review of CSE’s work and Anil Agarwal’s leadership is provided by Ramachandra Guha in Agarwal’s obituary, titled ‘environmentalist of the poor’69. A few things are worth

65 http://urbanlabs.uchicago.edu/page/urban-labs-innovation-challenge-delhi 66 http://urbanlabs.uchicago.edu/page/delhi-prior-events 67 February 11, 2016. All exemptions in Phase 1 of odd-even to continue…Times of India 68 http://www.cseindia.org/content/about-cse 69 19 January 2002. (Ramachandra Guha) Environmentalist of the poor: Anil Agarwal. EPW

noting here. First, in CSE’s website, though Agarwal’s leadership is mentioned as arising from sheer intellectual and social genius in pursuit of objective truth (which Guha whole-heartedly agrees with), his visions were critically shaped by the Chipko Movement, which he ‘discovered’, his brief work at International Institute for Environment and Development in London, and a meeting in Penang, Malaysia, which had brought out a small ‘state of the environment’ report. Second, his persuasive spoken and written word coupled with insight converted ‘pagans’ wherever he went; and thirdly, as CSE grew and published and campaigned, it also maintained a distance from other campaigns of social and environmental justice of the time, most prominently the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) which was not covered adequately in its fortnightly magazine Down to Earth.

With these caveats in mind, we can turn to analysing its articulations of Delhi’s air. From 1996 onwards, CSE published numerous reports in Down to Earth portraying diesel vehicles as the main polluters, on account of their particulate pollution. This was a new concern, even for CSE. In its earlier First Citizens’ Report published in 1982, neither Delhi nor particulate matter for CSE’s chief concern. Thermal power plants were characterized as biggest polluters, spewing fly ash, soot and smoke 70, next to Bombay71, and particulate matter was grouped together with ‘other’ pollutants, as SPM (Suspended Particulate Matter). Then, in 1996, Slow Murder was released, setting the agenda for the next ten years of CSE’s urban campaigns, identifying diesel vehicles as primary polluters, and giving recommendations for clearing Delhi’s toxic air. However, it began with a personal story.

In summer of 1995, Anil Agarwal was stuck in a long (‘hundreds of thousands’) line of cars getting their tailpipes checked, an initative started by Maneka Gandhi in 1991. After doing some ‘mental calculations’, he concluded that this was not only a gimmick and a ‘great publicity stunt’, it was a gross violation of the state’s responsibility and accountability to its people72. He named the entire performance ‘state-sponsored slow murder’, and called Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) as the ‘Indian Council for state-sponsored Promotion of Slow Murder’73 .

If state sponsored this metaphorical murder, then Delhi’s people were equally complicit, by

The technical complexity of the issue was emphasized over and over again as a reason to why NGOs and public were not able to articulate brown issues: ‘highly technical problem’, ‘technical character of the issue’. Moreover, it even positioned the government as lacking expertise: ‘Government of India is totally losing its ability to deal with complex issues’74 . This provided an opportunity for CSE to articulate and with it, translate the complex nature of the issue. It urged civil society and the report’s readers to continue reading on despite the ‘highly technical prose’.

70 (Agarwal & Narain, 1982; p. 76) 71 (Agarwal & Narain, 1982; p. 76) 72 (Sharma & Roychowdhury, 1996; p. 6) 73 (Sharma & Roychowdhury, 1996; p.13) 74 (Sharma & Roychowdhury, 1996; p.13)

This technical articulation allowed CSE to position itself as a scientifically objective research organization while remaining apolitical, exposing the ‘politics of emissions standards’:

‘The exercise of fixing pollution norms, meanwhile was kicked out of its scientific domain and assumed a political hue’75

Through this statement, CSE claimed to be a whistleblower by exposing ‘games’ played by MEF (Ministry of Environment & Forests), MOST (Ministry of Surface Transport) and automobile manufacturers in the dilution of standards as responsibility shifted from one ministry to another. In tune, a cartoon showed three men ‘passing the muck’ of air pollution: representing Industry, Ministry of Environment & Forests, and Ministry of Petroleum76. This rhetoric of murder allowed CSE to articulate Delhi’s air pollution as an environmental crime: in a statement of metaphorical allegation, it asks,

“Are we willing to call Rahul Bajaj as Environmental Criminal No. 1?”77

This emphasized CSE’s concern with vehicles. Here we, read one of its first strong statements in which it positions vehicles as the definite culprit:

‘Delhi’s inhabitants inhale the most polluted air in the country, and vehicular pollution is responsible for 64% of it’78

From here on, CSE identifies four ‘culprits’ for vehicular pollution-outdated vehicle technology due to manufacturer’s unwillingness to upgrade; poor fuel quality produced by public sector refineries; poor vehicle maintenance by indifferent consumers; poor traffic planning that fails to anticipate crises and to discourage growth of privately owned motors79.

In this context, the Ambassador car came to embody the materiality of this concern: In a cartoon titled ‘Hindustan Motors di gaddi’, an ambassador was drawn spewing black fumes80; Its carburettor was said to be outdated and no change had been implemented in vehicle design since 33 years of its conception81(p.45)

However, it is interesting to observe here that both diesel and petrol cars were treated equally by this 1996 report. Emissions inventories helped to substantiate this: Delhi had the highest NOx, second-highest SPM, and second highest SO2

82. Out of that, vehicles accounted for 97%

of HC (hydrocarbons), 48% of NOx, and 76% of CO emissions’83.

As for SPM, its linkage with diesel was still not articulated. CSE said that most of SPM is from power and industry sources. When diesel was articulated on, focus was on refining 75 (Sharma & Roychowdhury, 1996; p.49) 76 (Sharma & Roychowdhury, 1996; p.9) 77 Rahul Bajaj was (and is) the Chairman of Bajaj Automobiles Ltd in 1996, and had been planning to introduce low-cost diesel two-wheelers. 78 (Sharma & Roychowdhury, 1996; p.23) 79 (Sharma & Roychowdhury, 1996; p.30) 80 (Sharma & Roychowdhury, 1996; p.45) 81 (Sharma & Roychowdhury, 1996; p.45) 82 Petroleum Research Institute 83 (Sharma & Roychowdhury, 1996; p.29)

technologies (e.g. fluidized catalytic cracking, delayed coking units) that produced unstable diesel, increase in sulphur and carbon content due to a higher ‘cut’ (middle distillates with boiling temperatures 150-300º C are diesel, kerosene and aviation turbine fuel, higher cut means including heavy distillates as well by increasing boiling range).

Health concerns to air pollution were also illustrated by the 1996 report. This proceeded in steps: first, life was shown to be in medical and economic prognosis, articulated as health costs of ambient air pollution in Delhi84; second, statistics related to diseases linked to air pollution were reported, classifying pollutants as having toxic and carcinogenic effects; third, a photo by Dr. Naresh Trehan was printed, supposedly comparing lungs of two fifty-year old men-one from Delhi having black lungs, other from Himachal Pradesh having clean, pink lungs85.

All these articulations permitted CSE to make its final articulation, implicating vehicles:

‘we no longer need any proof of the fact that vehicular pollution is leading cause’86

Next sections of the report demanded ‘clean air’ from the slow-murdering government and listed out numerous recommendations for each of its four identified culprits. In these recommendations, we find that CNG is only listed as a ‘potential’ fuel, with CSE itself stating its main disadvantage: it is non-renewable and expensive compared to diesel.

The above analysis illustrates that while vehicles emerged as CSE’s concern, the link with particulate matter, diesel and CNG had still not emerged. Though these are points of later discussion, it is worthwhile to note that in the report The Leapfrog Factor: Clearing the Air in Asian cities published by CSE in 2004, release of Slow Murder was entextualized as the ‘awareness phase’ towards conversion to CNG, even while that report never mentioned CNG as the explicit solution. Further, CSE now used the word ‘Asian’ to denote a common experience that all Asian countries faced in combating air pollution.

In 2016, CSE wants to go ‘global’. This is explicitly formulated in its Strategic Plan 2014-18, titled ‘Reinventing Practice & Influencing Policies: for inclusive and sustainable futures’ (in which the word ‘global’ occurs 130 times) where it explains that it has ‘matured in India in stages’, working from ‘Southern imperative’, citing assistance in Bangladesh, Bhutan and Sri Lanka as examples of that87. It concludes that it must act in a ‘global-local’ world. Now, its vocabulary of clean air is no more an allegory for murder: the Right to Clean Air campaign renamed as ‘Clean Air and Sustainable Mobility Programme’. This doesn’t mean that vehicles-or diesel, for that matter, is out of CSE’s agenda-it is built into its plans to go global.

This was apparent at the CSE-organized Conclave on Clean Air Action, renamed as ‘Public Meeting: Our Right to Clean Air’ where numerous graphs and figures were presented to

84 World Bank study: The Cost of Inaction: Valuing the Economy-wide Cost of Environmental Degradation in India 85 (Sharma & Roychowdhury, 1996; p.105) 86 (Sharma & Roychowdhury, 1996; p.119) 87 2014. Reinventing Practice & Influencing Policies: for inclusive and sustainable futures. CSE, New Delhi; p. 20-21.

Delhi’s CM to demand for cleaner air implementation schemes-mainly with more technology and more barriers (of plants and plastic). Another highlight of this Conclave was a presence of international experts, not just Asian, but ‘global’ experts, who presented their work on combating air pollution in their respective countries (UK and China).

Analysis of these articulations shows that CSE, as a civil society entity, constantly reviewed and re-positioned itself in context of Delhi’s air. Moreover, legislations that were actually enabled by a multiple of actors (as we have seen in previous articulations by state and judiciary) including the CSE, and contested by them (as we will see later), were entextualized as one linear narrative with a clear enemy, demand and strategy CSE’s 2004 report (M.C. Mehta finds only two mentions there, for example), and in its Strategic Plan for 2014-18. Additionally, to stabilize this narrative and expand its own role (and with it, no. of partnerships and funding agencies), it speaks in a multi-scalar vocabulary of locality and globality. Whom does this vocabulary speak for? And what does it not articulate?

(iv) Greenpeace

In contrast to state, judiciary and CSE, Greenpeace is a new actor articulating on Delhi’s air through its campaign ‘Clean Air Nation’. A glance at its website tells me that so far, 70, 174 signatures have been garnered through its various campaigning activities (this is mostly done through the ‘stop and request’ method-where a group of volunteers go around asking people to sign their pledges, wearing clothes and accessories specifically designed around the campaign with other props like posters, banners; and through extensive social networking). In a prelude to the campaign, it states:

‘Air pollution is an urgent public health issue which requires urgent solutions. Our children are hit hardest by the lack of clean air. Right now, 35% of school children in India have poor lung health. It’s time to act’88

But it doesn’t matter if one reads this statement-it stands only as a supporting text to a background image: a child wearing a surgical mask stares right into one’s eyes. Through its Facebook page, it shares news, narratives, posters, informatics and photos of its various events: people posing for Instagram, posing with posters, banners and mask. An analysis of those photos, however , shows us that Greenpeace’s articulations also changed over time, though they were communicated using different kinds of media.

Its first articulation was through an awareness event held on 14 February 2015 (celebrated worldwide as Valentine’s Day), titled ‘Love is in the air, so is Pollution’, where volunteers posed with morning joggers near Connaught Place in Delhi with posters reading ‘We love clean air’. This was shared in social media (Facebook, Twitter & Instagram) through ‘#ToxiCity: Let us clean Delhi’s air’. The same year, posters conveyed multiple articulations of Delhi’s air: a photo-shopped image of Mahatama Gandhi wearing a mask, a child wearing a mask, a family standing beside the tail-end of a vehicle emitting fumes with smoke-spewing industrial cityscapes in background, two posters showing ‘black lung disease’ in dolphins and dogs. Its tag also changed, it became #Ilovemylungs. These articulations to substantiate air are apparently diverse: A potent image from history, an image of a vulnerable entity, 88 http://www.greenpeace.org/india/en/What-We-Do/Quit-Coal/Clean-Air-Nation/

poster of all-too familiar polluting sources threatening to poison the family, and an appeal to non-humans. All this directed to an audience that finds itself momentarily waiting for its newsfeed to refresh. Whom does it imagery exclude?

Greenpeace India’s website is interesting: A button ‘ACT NOW’ screams for attention on the front page, again with an image of a child wearing a mask-this will direct one to the signature campaign mentioned above. However, there is another source to know about Greenpeace’s articulation in its website-hovering the mouse over tab ‘What we do’ opens up its various campaigns: Stop Climate Change, Quit Coal, Energy Revolution, Nuclear, and Sustainable Agriculture. Here, under ‘Quit Coal’, we find ‘Air Pollution’ written. This feature was absent until October 2015. Clicking on that directs one to the signature campaign once again. But this time, it was supplanted with other features: Blogs, News, and a set of FAQs. Amidst everyone pointing to vehicular pollution, Greenpeace points to coal. By this time, another event was held, titled ‘Clean Air Nation’, with the poster ‘How high is your PM2.5?’ Its tag also transformed, from #Ilovemylungs to #SolutionNotPollution. Did something change in October 2015?

Greenpeace India’s Air Pollution Campaigner is one of my key respondents (No.2). In an in-depth interview, I asked him how he got associated with Greenpeace, and he replied:

“first I was actually working on Mahan coal mines…you might have heard the story…it was successful…I then got associated with air pollution and have been working on this”

In fact, Greenpeace India claims the ‘Mahan Story’ as one of its successful campaigns, when a coal block formation was prevented in Mahan village, Madhya Pradesh (also associated with the arrest of Greenpeace activist Priya Pillai-this event attracted widespread media attention). Greenpeace India’s stories for Mahan have very different images: women and men (mostly old) are photographed within a forest. My respondent claims to have closely worked on this case. When I asked him about the shift in the NGO’s ‘hashtag’ from #ToxiCity to #SolutionNotPollution, he said:

“I was not a part of the picture when it was called ToxiCity…but that time also we were trying to raise awareness about air pollution....but after that, what? What is the next step when you have made it clear to the people of Delhi and the AAP government has also taken measures...We have to talk about India…hence we call it Clean Air Nation…because that’s what we are demanding for now”

This campaigner, through his blogs and published reports, has constantly articulated Delhi’s air as part of a wider regional air-shed comprising of the Indo-Gangetic Plain, using satellite images sourced from NASA to show a red spread over the Plain89. He compares this situation to China, which had initiated a regional action plan for clean air in 2015. In fact, he argues that the main reason Delhi is the most polluted city in the world has little to do with Delhi itself-it is because it could not implement a regional plan unlike China in time. On this comparison, he says:

89 http://www.greenpeace.org/india/Global/india/2015/docs/nationalcleanairactionplan.pdf

“. It (China) has a massive policy now to improve air quality. They have taken regional measures so it is successful. In 2015 they came up with a Clean Air Action Plan and also issue health advisory now…Similar for us. We are in the Indo-Gangetic plains…we have similar issues. There should be a regional and a national plan to increase accountability, reach maximum people. At the end of the day…the same question comes up. What should people do? There has to be a timeline for action…”

In articulating Delhi’s air as regional, national, as well as comparing it with China, this respondent tries to distinguish himself (as an Environmental Sciences graduate from TERI University, he is considered an expert) and Greenpeace apart at various events (for example, in ‘Beating the odds for air pollution in India’, a discussion between experts and journalists in April 2016, he represented the ‘national’ angle). Also, if we take him as representative of Greenpeace’s official position-this organization expects people to take action:

“in the end that’s what we want to happen…that people ask for it…that this becomes an issue over which people come together…after all if thermal power plants and industries can display real-time data on monitors then people will know what is happening. That’s important…”

Action would not arise on its own, but through monitoring: here, a technology is assumed to mobilize collective action.

Greenpeace India’s articulations also change, perhaps both due to individual agency and due to its effort to distinguish itself from a Delhi-centred discourse.

(v) HelpDelhiBreathe: A ‘hybrid’ alliance

On 17 January 2016, I attended an event called ‘March to Save Delhi’s Air’ in Jantar Mantar initiated by a group called ‘Pollution Solution’ which said on its Facebook page:

‘Let's make some noise! A peaceful gathering to demand implementation of policies and practice to clean up our city's air. We all must play our part!’90

This event was titled ‘Help Delhi Breathe’. Their campaign logo, displayed on the cover photo, is half a gas mask and half an orange flower. I followed discussions on the Facebook group to get an idea about the event before going there. There were posts with links to companies manufacturing air purifiers, a woman had posted a selfie with a Vogmask91, and a big discussion on source of Delhi’s pollution-with the consensus emerging that ‘some elements’ were burning, and ‘when there is burning, there is fire’. A lot of the commentators in the group were expatriates-some were particularly vocal, expressing deep anguish at the polluted air they had to breathe compared to the clean air ‘back home’. One woman commented:

90 Fieldnotes 91 Started in 2011 by Wendover Brown after attending the Burning Man Festival of 2011 to create ‘stylish’ masks, a part of ‘pollution chic’: http://mic.com/articles/130847/air-masks-becoming-fashion-statement-as-air-pollution-grows#.x9NlY1Twr

‘I smelt something burning the moment I landed in Delhi a decade back. I have lived my childhood in the countryside of Germany. I know how pure air looks and feels like92’ This was knowledge borne out of personal experience, which contrasted with her daily experiences in Delhi; moreover, she lamented that people of Delhi ‘just don’t feel the air’93. There were appeals for volunteers, and attendees were asked to wear their masks (assuming they had bought one), bring musical instruments and other props. Meanwhile, Jai Dhar Gupta, founder of NirvanaBeing, claimed:

“Friends, this is not a protest event. It is purely a show of support from the citizens of Delhi that, Delhi supports change. We hope to empower our politicians to take bold decisions to reverse air pollution in Delhi NCR. We are also hoping that the events in Delhi will show the way to other Urban Cities in India and the rest of the World.”

At the venue, there was an agglomeration of loosely bound groups of people, most of them wearing stylish Vogmasks; there were substantial number of expatriates. These ‘citizens of Delhi’ held up posters and got their photographs clicked. Greenpeace was also a member of this alliance: its managers and volunteers produced a number of posters with messages such as ‘Save Delhi’s Air’, ‘My Delhi, My Responsibility’, etc.

The March was more of a stage performance: different stakeholders of this event gave speeches: Jeff Smith, a long-term resident of Delhi, narrated a grave incident where his daughter became ill because of air pollution a few years ago that made turned him into an ‘air activist’ (he later became one of my respondents); Sunil Dahiya (whom I earlier introduced as respondent no. 2) pointing for a regional action, Ashutosh Dixit from URJA, arguing for a behavioural change, a collective of RWAs, and Jai Dhar Gupta, arguing that ‘sustainable solutions’ must be searched for.

Spearheading the campaign was Reecha Upadhayay, former Program Officer, India, of The Asia Foundation (a ‘nonprofit international development organization which combines experience and local expertise to reflect on critical issues affecting Asia in the 21st century’94) and erstwhile resident of New York. She had been working as a consultant on issues related to gender, peace and conflict at various agencies of the United Nations since 2000 there, and after that, in South Sudan, India, and Nepal. Currently, she is associated with a digital media production studio95, having produced short films for ‘One Billion Rising’ 96. This event got covered only in UK’s Daily Mail, in which Ms. Upadhayay said:

“Though the effects of the recently-concluded ‘odd-even’ scheme on pollution in Delhi are yet to be ascertained, it has definitely boosted the morale of the city. Delhiites feel part of a bigger change now. There is a growing consciousness that we need to hand over a cleaner

92 Emphasis mine 93 Fieldnotes 94 http://asiafoundation.org/about/ 95 http://www.jamun.net/ 96 http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/13/in-india-one-billion-rising-resonates-with-many/?_r=0

planet to the next generation. Before the momentum fizzles out, we decided to cash in on the enthusiasm with this event…”97

In this, there are two articulations that seem to contradict each other: one, that ‘Delhiites feel part of a bigger change’, immediately followed by a qualification- that this feeling would be temporary. Who was Ms. Upadhayay speaking for? After the march, I saw the same people attending the events that I did, clearly having an interest in Delhi’s air. In fact, some of them became my key respondents. The momentum doesn’t seem to have fizzled out from these people. It became stronger.

I attended three more events organized by the alliance after this. By the second event in February 2016, the coalition had started to call itself ‘Help Delhi Breathe’ rather than ‘Pollution Solution’ (it renamed its Facebook page too). At the discussion following a talk titled ‘Air Pollution in Delhi-NCR: Be the change!’ by Jai Dhar Gupta, strong voices were heard (some of them had attended the earlier mentioned ‘march’): ‘people on the road need to be sensitized’, ‘Why cant one provide piped gas to the urban poor?’, ‘we will undertake environmental migration-away from Delhi’. The speaker did not directly comment on these issues and stated that ‘there was no convenient solution’.

On April 23, 2016, Help Delhi Breathe organized a ‘Clean Air Fair’, an ‘evening of entertainment, art and activism with leading experts and demonstrations of clean technologies’. An opening band commenced the evening after which Sunil Dahiya, the Greenpeace expert soberly described the pollution crisis. I asked his opinion about the event; he said, “As long as it helps the larger cause, its fine. But its of course for entertainment…as long as people listen, its good”. Other speakers for the evening included Anumita Roychowdhury from CSE, Vimlendu Jha from Swechha, and Dr. Randeep Guleria from AIIMS.

Surrounding the stage were stalls, from vendors of hybrid and electric cars and rickshaws to air purifiers, air monitors, air filtration masks, organic food producers, water and waste management services. Since I had arrived early, I talked to each of them. In the end, I procured a range of free goodies, got my photograph taken for Instagram, and had a bag full of brochures and business cards. When I asked how they were associated with Help Delhi Breathe, I got a diverse range of responses: most elicited personal contacts and relationships (e.g. Ambience Monitoring, a company founded by Jeff Smith, NirvanaBeing, set up Mr. Gupta itself, and AirVeda, set up by former IIT-Delhi graduate Namita Gupta) some had sent an email to the coalition with a proposal of the stall (most of these being start-ups), and some just mumbled something and looked away, or pretended they didn’t hear it. When I asked how these products were different from each other, I got following sets of differentiating responses: imported from Germany (good), imported from China (bad), suitable to Indian conditions, suitable for a particular room area, doesn’t emit ozone, and is low cost.

Keeping these activities in mind, what Jai Dhar Gupta says is very illuminating:

97 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/indiahome/indianews/article-3401844/Help-Delhi-breathe-Hundreds-Capital-residents-rally-Jantar-Mantar-demand-smog-free-air.html

“Clearly, we've run out of clean water and air - the path that we are on is unsustainable.Clearly, we can't depend on politicians who are more interested in short term political gain. Friends, stop feeling helpless - come out and be a part of change - listen to experts, see micro and macro solutions. Become armed and impactful98 - this is our Delhi, it is our responsibility!!”99 Clearly, this deploys a militant (surveillance, defensive and offensive) rhetoric, where clean air technologies are supposed to both protect oneself from an invisible enemy (air), make the enemy visible through monitoring, and finally, armed with information, to sanitize the enemy. This is reflected in the way vendors arranged these products in their stalls. A photograph is illustrative here:

At the flanks are defensive strategies: two head mannequins wearing masks; at the centre are offensive and surveillance strategies: a monitor and a purifier. The salesman at the stall tells me: ‘Maximum effect when used together’, not unlike military strategies. A person in possession of these products would become more than human-she would become a hybrid, of technology and biology. This point is excellently articulated by Kosek where he discusses a militarization of the honeybee, which as a result, has become a hybrid (Kosek, 2010)

In its own website, Help Delhi Breathe enunciates: ‘we are a group of concerned citizens, businesses and organizations working to fight dangerous air pollution and help all100 residents of Delhi breathe the pure, clean air they deserve’. However, as we from its actual practices, it doesn’t mean ‘all’ in the all-encompassing sense.

3. Points of Contestation

My use of ‘points of contestation’ is similar to Whatmore’s use of ‘knowledge controversies’ (Whatmore, 2009) in the sense that these arise when ‘things that are solid melt into the air’. That is, when objective, scientific rationality becomes a matter of dispute and the

98 Emphasis mine 99 Facebook page for Clean Air Fair 100 Emphasis mine

Figure 1. NirvanaBeing products

foregrounding of everyday, taken-for-granted common sense or knowledges occurs. However, she uses ‘controversy’ in a special sense-when knowledge claims are subjected to public scrutiny and debate; that is when expertise claims are contested in spaces that aren’t exclusive to experts. In the case of Delhi’s air, that is certainly expected when claims of expertise are contested in media, for example-but I think this assumes an a priori notion of such spaces. Further, I think issues of representation and incommensurability of knowledges (Pigg, 2001) are more at stake there. Nevertheless, thinking along the lines of a controversy is useful for examining the production of knowledge-no matter where it might be contested.

With that in mind, I use ‘contestation’ to also articulate what Latour means by processes of ‘hybridization’ and ‘purification’ in We Have Never Been Modern (Latour, 1993). That is, if air is a hybrid, neither subject nor object (not even bound in a dialectial relationship between the two), then how is it that it has been purified to become a truly scientific object/subject? To do that, one partakes in the reversal-‘hybridization’: examining the dis-junctures and fractures that develop within experts themselves. The first step is to see the fluidities of their articulation (i.e. claims-making is itself a historical and a relational process), as has been attempted in the previous section. The next step is the process of translation, i.e. negotiation of expertise between experts. This is helpful to show that ‘knowledge’ is not produced passively but in an active process of negotiation and contestation, akin to Callon’s notion of ‘enrollment’(Callon, 1986).

3.1 1990s

3.1.1. Industrial relocation: Polluting and/or non-conforming?

In the early 20th century, relieving central Delhi from congestion was the main concern: Conversations starting from 1934 between various associations of industries, Delhi Improvement Trust, and A.P. Hume, with an influential report titled ‘Report on the Relief of Congestion in Delhi’101 show that an ‘industrial area scheme’ to establish an industrial colony on outskirts of Delhi along with the ‘natural corollary’ being the migration of a large factory population to the new site, relieving pressure on the city. Possible locations for this industrial colony were extensively debated and contested amongst colonial officials for the next ten years with the result that the proposed scheme never materialized and new industries were initiated at the land earmarked for relocation (Sharan, 2014).

In those contestations, we see questions regarding lack of precise information about nature of harm posed by existing industries: ‘first requirement was a good knowledge of nature of industry, nature of product manufactured, type of building in which it was housed’. Concerns about nature of flooding, direction of wind flow and sewage predominated. Similarly, when the Master Plan was being formulated, planners evaluated two sources of knowledges: social scientific survey as envisioned in the Geddesian framework and zoning. The former emphasized the survey is not mere data collection but depends ‘on its appeals to individuals that compose the city…without ignoring apathy and overpowering opposition’; the latter

101 A.P. Hume, Report on the Relief of Congestion in Delhi’ (Simla: Government of India Press, 1936), Vol. 1., pp. 50-1

emphasized a need to move beyond laws of nuisance that were increasingly suspect in growing and complex cities. The former argued that zoning was an ‘arbitrary act’ since Municipal councils couldn’t foresee and map exact land-use patterns that would organically develop. However, ‘in the Indian context’, zoning was evaluated as a better practice due to its ability to control overcrowding and provision of adequate public supplies.

Thus, the DMP-1962, classifying land on basis of use, was a product of two contested forms of knowledge, in which one form was evaluated to be more suitable to a particular context by planners than the other. It employed ‘personal inspection’ to judge the scale of nuisance of industries and surveys to judge their size. This produced two categories: polluting (hazardous/noxious/obnoxious) and non-conforming industries; accordingly a timeframe was developed within these had to relocate. However, as has been discussed before (Sharan, 2014), this did not materialize as imagined. Thus, in September 1999, when in response to M.C.Mehta v. Union of India and Others102, the court ordered relocation of non-conforming industries, the confusion became polluting and non-conforming became apparent.

A survey carried out by the DPCC in1995-6 showed that 1 lakh industries in Delhi were operated in non-conforming areas103. Next, a group of experts was set up for determining polluting industries amongst list of 54 'F' category industries under the MPD – 2001which reported that ‘the industrial processes involving or using electroplating, dyeing, pickling, anodizing, coal fired boilers, forging and casting are polluting in nature’ and recommended a list of 33 activities to be polluting104. These two surveys were evaluated to be better than a third survey carried out by the State government, which the SC said was based on perceptional survey and hence, was ‘neither scientific, nor precise nor reliable... it does not even contain detailed particulars industries - whether they are polluting or non- polluting, licensed or unlicensed’. 105

Thus, whereas polluting industries in DMP-1962 were classified on basis of personal inspection, it was this technique itself that was called redundant, un-scientific and unreliable SC. As Sharan notes, ‘notwithstanding this lack of clarity’, polluting and/or non-conforming industries were ordered to be sealed up in gross violations of both the Master Plans.

3.1.2 Fuel Policy and CNG

One of the first contestations to emerge in this context is the evolution of emissions standards of vehicles. Responsibilities for emissions are distributed between vehicle owners, manufacturers, and enforcing agencies under different rules and acts: vehicular emission norms are notified under EPA rules 1990 and incorporated in Motor Vehicles Act 1989, enforced by Min. of Surface Transport. These rules for vehicle owners are based on volumetric concentration of gases in total exhaust measurements; also, they should not emit ‘smoke, visible vapour, grit, sparks, ashes, cinder or substance’. Enforcing agencies under

102 SC WP 4677; DLT 345SC 103 SC WP 4677; DLT 345SC; p.5 104 SC WP 4677; DLT 345SC; p.17 105 SC WP 4677; DLT 345SC; p. 8

these rules may direct any vehicle owner to get emissions checked by approved instruments. These have not been revised.

Manufacturers’ responsibility for mass emissions standards was first notified in 1991 (for gasoline) and in 1992 (for diesel) and revised in 1996 and further in 2000. For these, two ‘expert’ committees were constituted along with recommendations from MEF: H B Mathur Committee 1991 (headed by Prof. H.B. Mathur of IIT-Delhi), Raju sub-committee 1991, and an MEF (Ministry of Environment & Forests) in 1993. The final version was adopted by MEF in 1993. Only three pollutants are considered- CO, HC, NOx. One can also note a dilution of standards from 1991-1996: for example, CO changed from 5-9 to 8.68-12.4. A note on how mass emissions standards are calculated is illustrative.

Mass emissions standards are evaluated according to simulations of driving cycles. The Indian driving cycle, which accommodates idling, skewed acceleration and deceleration is determined by chassis dynamometer test: cars are selected randomly and there is 10-20% relaxation for mass production. Developed by ARAI (Automotive Research Association of India) on the basis of vehicular data in selected cities, it shows more emissions levels during simulation cycles. The European driving cycle, in contrast, is based on ‘better road conditions and has gentler acceleration and deceleration curves’-shows less emissions. Also, sampling of cars to test for emissions during driving cycle simulations is done through averaging. It involves keeping a log on vehicles produced every day, and compared with the previous six month average. Indian driving cycles, which uses random selection, the incentive is on every vehicle to be within prescribed standards.

This brings us to our first point of contestation while deciding mass emission standards: European v. Indian driving cycles. Automobile manufactures claimed that Indian driving cycle was not representative as no two cities were alike. Further, since technology transfers and tie-ups are designed according to European driving cycles, it would be easier to adopt that. Officials in CPCB and MEF agreed, but insisted on a corrective factor for road conditions in India. In the final version, no driving cycle was defined for emissions standards.

Second point of contestation was between ‘warm start’ and ‘cold start’ (cold start is the engine starting from cold, giving more emissions, as opposed to less when it is already warm). Prof. H.B. Mathur had recommended cold start, but it was replaced by warm start in subsequent committees. CPCB articulated this as ‘giving industry time to adjust’. Further, it pointed out that

“experts have to depend mostly on experience of other countries and resort to approximation… other countries…become prime consideration for setting up emission standards”

Thus, knowledges situated in two diverse contexts was negotiated by experts, and selectively appropriated based on which showed less emissions in simulation exercises. Finally, standards were notified regardless of driving cycles, but were based on ‘warm start’.

The third point of contestation arose in relation to steps required after emissions standards were notified-the debate on catalytic convertors. Catalytic convertors can be two-way (combining CO, O2 and hydrocarbons to produce CO2 and water) or three-way (in addition reducing NO and NO2 to N2-inert and non polluting). These reactions use palladium or platinum as catalysts-to speed up these otherwise slow processes. When Mathur committee suggested that vehicles be upgraded to meet revised 1996 norms, two routes could be adopted: improve engine design or use catalytic convertors. For meeting 1996 norms, convertors weren’t required. For meeting 2000 norms, however, both improvements in engine design and using catalytic convertors (unless a better technology became available and usable) were necessary. Earlier, AIAM had agreed to meet standards using engine modifications but citing technological incapacity, wanted to install catalytic convertors instead. This diverted attention to another issue. Catalytic convertors required unleaded petrol and low-sulphur diesel; both lead and sulphur would ‘poison’ catalysts and render the entire machinery ineffective.

Now the onus was on Ministry of Petroleum to supply unleaded petrol and low-sulphur diesel to Delhi. Also, catalytic convertors could be only used with a chemically correct (stochiometric) mix of fuel and air, and this ratio needs to be maintained throughout combustion, requiring a ‘closed-loop system’, which none of the manufacturers had. Though concerns were raised regarding its efficiency and cost (Sharma & Roychowdhury,1996), ‘experts’ have generally considered its introduction a success106.

For the next ten years after introduction of catalytic convertors, pollution abatement strategies in Delhi focused on changes in fuel policy. In 1991, Supreme Court had set up a committee under Justice Saikia to assess globally available technologies for controlling vehicular pollution, current status of technologies available in India, examine cheaper alternatives, and recommend administrative or legal regulations required for implementation107. This was again constituted due to the ‘highly technical’ nature of the debate. One of its recommendations was use of Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) as an alternative fuel-it polluted les, cost less (compared to other hydrocarbon-based fuels like propane) and its stocks were greater compared to petrol or diesel. However, as has been noted, this was not the first official discussion about CNG in India (Narain & Bell, 2005).

In 1988, GoI took a massive USD 295 million108 from World Bank for a ‘Western Gas Development Project’ to ‘accelerate the production and utilization of natural gas in India as a replacement for imported petroleum products…saving substantial foreign exchange and helping to overcome energy shortages that constrain economic growth’109. The loan was lent to Oil and Natural Gas Corporation of India (ONGC) which then introduced CNG on an experimental basis in its own vehicles. The Saikia committee, of which M.C. Mehta was a member, cited these initiatives in its report. Then, in September 1994, the parliament passed the Motor Vehicles Amendment Act to promote use of alternative fuels such as CNG. In

106 http://www.moef.nic.in/downloads/public-information/Environmental-Regulations-PPT.pdf 107 108 Non-adjusted value 109 World Bank. 1988. India - Western Gas Development Project. Washington, DC: World Bank; p. 3.

1995, on the basis of Saikia committee’s recommendations, SC ordered all government cars to switch to CNG or use catalytic convertors and unleaded petrol.

Then, CSE published Slow Murder, which Justice Kuldeep Singh claimed to have read110 and issued a suo moto notice to Delhi government to come up with an action plan to control the city’s air pollution. On November 18, 1996, Kiran Dhingra, then commissioner-cum-secretary of Delhi’s Transport Department filed an affidavit in SC, stating that mass transit systems should be a priority and that bypasses be constructed around Delhi to stop polluting trucks from entering Delhi. She also stated that a task force comprised of representatives from relevant government departments and from civil society draw up action plans and a timeline to implement them111.

The Delhi government, along with then Lieutenant-Governor, announced a few steps after the Dhingra affidavit, but nothing major took place. Then, in 1997, Saifuddin Soz, then Union minister for environment and forests published a ‘White paper on pollution control in Delhi’, based on a similar structure as Slow Murder-it divided recommendations into three categories: in-use vehicles, fuel quality, and traffic management112. This, along with Dhingra’s recommendation to constitute a task force, led SC chief justice Jagdish Sharan Verma to direct MoEF to set up an authority to advise the court on pollution and monitor implementation of its orders.

In January 1998, EPCA was formed for NCR under section 3 of EPA 1986( which mandates Union government to constitute authorities for exercising and performing powers and functions and allows the government to sub-delegate its role and functions to a designated authority) . Its members were: –Bhure Lal, Anil Agarwal (CSE), Jagdish Khattar (executive director, MUL113) representing AIAM114 and Kiran Dhingra. Again, the motive was to’ provide technical support to back decision-making’. In its first report published in June 1998 titled Report on monitoring and priority measures proposed by authority for air pollution control,it submitted an action plan to reduce air pollution in next two years, largely based on the Dhingra affidavit and the previously mentioned White paper. On basis of this report, a three-member SC bench headed by Justice A.S. Anand directed all concerned authorities to abide by a timeframe: By March 31, 2001, the entire bus fleet should be converted to CNG, and leaded petrol should be eliminated.

Then, in 1999, based on a report by CARB which designated PM10 as a toxic air pollutant with diesel contributing the most to it, CSE published Engines of the devil to sensitize about toxic effects of diesel115. On its cover was a Tata Motors car, spewing fumes and black smoke over the Union government and the Auto industry (over which TELCO issued a legal notice

110 (Narain & Bell, 2005; p.10) 111 (Narain & Bell, 2005; p.12) 112 http://envfor.nic.in/divisions/cpoll/delpolln.html 113 Maruti Udyog Limited 114 Association of Indian Automobile Manufacturers; now Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (SIAM) 115 http://www.cseindia.org/userfiles/dieselmo.pdf

to CSE116). As a direct consequence, EPCA submitted a note to SC in April 1999 on ‘Restriction on the plying of diesel-driven vehicles in NCR’. Here, SC acknowledged the CARB report and directed ASG117 to inform the court about numbers of petrol and diesel vehicles in 1998-99. In the meantime, in an SC hearing on April 29, 199 headed by Justice B.N. Kirpal over TELCO’s lawsuit over CSE, the former’s advocate argued that that apart from diesel, petrol was also polluting- and EPCA doesn’t mention any measure related to that. It alleged that MUL which had representation in EPCA was a petrol manufacturer and not following Euro-I norms. As a result, SC ordered that all private vehicles following Euro-II norms be registered in NCR, that all private vehicles conform to Euro-I by 1999 and to Euro-II norms by April1, 2000 and that no vehicle be registered in NCR from that date which doesn’t follow Euro-II norms118.

These orders sparked the debate on ‘low-sulphur diesel’. By 1998, again via an SC order, sulphur content of diesel had been brought down from 10,000 ppm t0 2500 ppm. For Euro-II norms, 500 ppm diesel was necessary. In April 1999, Reliance Industries wrote to EPCA confirming that it may be able to supply 500 ppm (0.05%) diesel. Immediately, IOC said that it could offer the same too, contradicting its previous claims about availability. Then, in September 1999, IOC was supplying diesel with less than 0.05% sulphur (500 ppm) in selected outlets in NCT. The next target was high-benzene petrol. In October 1999, EPCA submitted a report to SC on emissions control for petrol two-stroke engines; followed again by Reliance writing to EPCA that it could supply 1% benzene-petrol to Delhi immediately; again IOC rushed in-assured supply within a month. Finally, SC ordered 1% benzene petrol to be supplied in NCR by October 1, 2000119.

It had also directed that by April 1, 2000, buses more than 8 years old would be taken off the road, except those running on ‘clean fuel’. As the date for order implementation came nearer, the debate also heated. In a SC hearing on March 26, 2001, SC relaxed its orders: schools, DTC and private operators could run diesel buses till September 30, 2001 provided they placed firm orders for CNG buses. Further, commercial vehicles were to display permit from principle secretary of transport department to run on diesel till that date120. As a few buses were set on fire on April 3, 2001, then Delhi CM Sheila Dikshit decided to allow buses to run on diesel-as long as they possessed receipts for CNG orders and photocopies of the affidavits from transport department. The next day, SC held Delhi government in ‘contempt of court’, followed by an apology from latter on April 18. Contempt charges were formally dropped a week later.

In view of earlier SC orders about low-sulphur diesel and 1% benzene-petrol, label of CNG as a ‘clean fuel’ came to be questioned. CSE calls this a ‘campaign of disinformation’, showing not only the importance of ‘information’, or various scientific studies were for establishment of CNG as a clean fuel, but also who chose to appropriate what study. In 2001,

116 (Roychowdhury et al., 2006; p.12) 117 Additional Solicitor-General 118 (Roychowdhury et al., 2006; p.14) 119 (Roychowdhury et al., 2006; p.19) 120 (Roychowdhury et al., 2006; p.21)

LG cited a study from Harvard University (Harvard Centre for Risk Analysis) which said that CNG emitted nano-particles, leading him to proclaim that CNG wasn’t desirable (that report was funded by Navistar, an influential diesel engine manufacturer). Next, TERI released a study, Delhi’s transport and the environment: shaken but not stirred 121claiming that ULSD (ultra-low sulphur diesel) is a better option than CNG. It didn’t clarify that ULSD, or diesel with less 10 ppm sulphur, was not available in India. R.K. Pachauri, director of TERI said ULSD was superior to CNG122. A third study questioning CNG was carried out by Prof. Dinesh Mohan of IIT Delhi, stating that CNG will lead to more CO and NOx compared to even 500 ppm diesel.

However, ‘ultra-low’ and ‘low’ were meshed in Delhi government’s appeals to EPCA: Sheila Dikshit and Ram Naik (then Union petroleum minister) decided to ask EPCA for ‘diesel with 0.05% sulphur as world-class standard clean fuel’, calling it ‘ultra-low sulphur diesel’. In view of these developments, SC asked EPCA to examine whether low-sulphur diesel could be considered a clean fuel in discussion with stakeholders. In presentations to EPCA, almost all parties argued in favour of low-sulphur diesel and against a single fuel-use policy. However, EPCA still favoured CNG. It argued that it wasn’t technically possible to specify a clean fuel that wasn’t polluting or injurious to health, though fuels like CNG, LPG and propane were less polluting. It defined another category of fuel, ‘environmentally acceptable’, including CNG, LPG, propane, unleaded petrol with less than 1% benzene and a catalytic convertor to boot, ULSD with low PAH (poly-aromatic hydrocarbons) content in combination with particulate filters and convertors. As for LSD, it could be treated as a ‘transitional’ fuel, as it didn’t permit use of particulate filters. This transition from ‘clean’ to ‘environmentally acceptable’ fuel sparked another debate.

On August 19, 2001, Delhi govt. requested the court to allow LSD only till CNG supply was adequate- rejected by the Court. Then, on August 28, Madan Lal Khurana, as a leader of opposition in Delhi assembly, led transporters to strike, stating that LSD should be allowed as a clean fuel. Further, LSD met the requirements of vehicular emissions norms of Euro-II vehicles. As a result, on August 30, Prime Minister Vajpayee called a meeting with Union ministers for home, petroleum, surface transport, environment minister and the CPCB chairperson, appointing a committee to work out an Auto Fuel Policy under the Director-General of CSIR-R.A. Mashelkar.

The Mashelkar committee submitted a report in February 2002, similar to EPCA’s original one-but diverged by saying that ‘Indian conditions’ need to inform any scientific data for policy, efforts should be made to minimize social costs, and ‘rather than a rigid and prescriptive policy, a flexible policy, which allows a multi-fuel and multi-technology option for reaching prescribed emission norms was desirable’123. Moreover, it made a politically charged statement: that government could only specify emission norms, and not vehicle

121 http://www.indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/content/31007/ultra-low-sulphur-myth/ 122 http://www.frontline.in/static/html/fl1818/18181200.htm 123 Mashelkar, R.A. et al. Intermim Report of the Expert committee on Auto Fuel Policy (New Delhi: GoI 2002); p. 2

technology or fuel quality124. This report was accepted by the Union government immediately. EPCA contests this report in SC, and in a hearing in March 2002, Justice Kirpal observed that there was no health expert in the Mashelkar committee, questioning its commitment to public health.

As Sharan notes, by constituting EPCA, SC had hoped for a scientific consensus to emerge for implementing CNG (Sharan, 2006; p.232). However, as several contestations arose, its rhetoric changed: due to thin, uncertain data, it appealed to the ‘precautionary principle’ citing various studies linking particulate pollution to cancer and cardio-respiratory diseases125,126. In this context, the court argued, for Mashelkar committee to recommend that role of the government to specify norms was ‘naïve at best’ and a ‘clear abdication of the constitutional and statutory duty cast upon the government to protect the environment’127.

It concluded that its 1998 order for conversion of entire city bus fleet (DTC & private) to single-fuel mode stands. It also setup a penalty regime for defaulters: a fine of Rs. 500/bus/day, to be hiked up to Rs. 1000 from May 6, 2002 until bus shifts to CNG. A penalty of Rs. 20,000 was imposed on the Union government for seeking modification of order since 1998. It was told to give preference to transport sector for CNG supply. In June 2002, the Union government doubled allocation of natural gas to Delhi. By July, 7000 CNG buses had been phased out. Finally, on December 1, 2002, in an almost planned manner, with considerable festivity, Sheila Dikshit flagged off the last diesel bus from Delhi.

This whole saga is celebrated as a ‘miracle’, an example to be followed by other countries in India and the developing world. At a recent ‘Clean Air Conclave’ in Delhi organized by CSE, this CNG story was remarked upon countless times by various ‘experts’: ‘this is what we can do’, ‘this is what we have done in the past’, ‘we wish London would do this’, and so on. The story, as told today by CSE, has clear protagonists and villains (it calls them ‘change-makers’128): CSE, Delhi government (former CM Sheila Dikshit, former President of India, Ajay Maken), judiciary (Kuldeep Singh, J.S. Verma, A.S. Anand, B.N. Kirpal; Harish Salve), and experts and scientists (Anil Agarwal, D.K. Biswas-former CPCB chairperson, Kiran Dhingra).

The others, it calls ‘saboteurs’: Ram Naik (then Union petroleum minister), B.C. Khanduri (then Minister of State for Road Transport), Parvez Hashmi (then State Transport Minister) and the Delhi Private Bus Operators Forum. This binary is explicitly drawn on those who argued for CNG (even if they initially didn’t), and those who opposed it (even if they didn’t, later). Moreover, based on this, CSE announced an ‘Anil Agarwal Air Pollution Model’129, stating it ‘took numbers crunching out of control of experts and gave it to people’. This model shows linear extrapolations of pollutants (PM, SOx, NOx) based on five scenarios: from control (doing nothing) to implementing everything it has recommended (best-case

124 http://www.frontline.in/static/html/fl1904/19040900.htm 125 (C Arden 3rd Pope et al., 2002) 126 (Lvovsky, 1998) 127 SC, M.C. Mehta v. Union of India and Others, WP 13029, on 5 April 2002, 2002 (2) SCR 963. 128 (Roychowdhury et al., 2006; p. 48) 129 (Roychowdhury et al., 2006; p. 41)

scenario). There is no discussion on what variables it considers, nor a discussion on confounding factors. This is ‘people science’, out of the domain of experts. This model, as well as its experience with Delhi’s air, helps CSE to expand itself regionally and globally, as is previously noted in this study. When I asked an ‘international air pollution consultant’ and a former CEO of the California Air Resources Board about the implementation of CNG in Delhi, she clearly said:

“The reason the Supreme Court ordered CNG conversions in Delhi is because that’s what the Centre for Science and Environment told them to do. And the reason CSE argued for CNG rather than clean diesel was because the latter would have taken much more time (at least three years more), more government capacity, and may not have worked as well in the end. CSE was very concerned about fuel adulteration which is still rampant in India. They were also concerned about manufacturing defects in the particulate filters. Finally, they recognized the utter lack of air quality personnel to take on major regulations. The CNG conversion order was enforced by the police, not the CPCB”130

The second beneficiary of CNG conversion was the then Delhi government, which was re-elected in the 2003 Assembly elections. While Ms. Dikshit was promoted as a ‘clean’, Mr. Ajay Maken was advertised as ‘Mr. CNG’. It continued to be in power till 2014, when it was replaced by AAP in a strong anti-incumbency wave generated due to the involvement of the government in various corruption scams.

The CNG conversion adversely affected autorickshaw drivers, since as public transport, they had to convert too. Sunalini Kumar has noted in a study that most drivers didn’t own their vehicles and those who did had brought them on loans and were just breaking even pre-CNG order. Post the conversion order, they sold their vehicles to autorickshaw owners who rented the vehicles at steep rates for meeting the cost of retro-fitting the rickshaws with CNG engines. The previous owners-drivers now became contract drivers (S. Kumar, 2004). Thus, the supposedly apolitical, ‘good for everyone’ technology had unequal outcomes.

3.2 2014-ongoing

These days, we see a heavy focus on particulate matter, monitoring and market-based solutions. While there were concerns related to these earlier, they didn’t become important points of debate. In 2014, after WHO declared Delhi to be the ‘world’s most polluted city’ (even though it claims that its reports are indicative of monitoring efforts by cities/countries and shouldn’t be used to rank cities131), the media characterized Delhi’s air as killer, a ‘gas chamber’, and its inhabitants (particularly children) as dying and falling sick every day132. In focus was PM2.5, or particulate matter of size 2.5 microns or less as insidious, invisible particles that ‘enter deep into the lungs’ and was carcinogenic133. Comparisons with Beijing

130 Personal communication 131 (World Health Organization, 2014) 132 May 8, 2014. ‘New Delhi has most polluted air in the world’. Livemint. 133 April 17, 2016. ‘Among metros, Delhi worst hit by PM2.5’. Times of India

in China started almost immediately, with media houses and civil society organizations lamenting that Delhi has ‘raced ahead’ of Beijing in the worst way possible134.

In response, newspapers published reports about foreign embassies issuing health advisories to its officials, calling Delhi a ‘hardship posting’ due to its pollution crisis135. U.S. Embassy reportedly bought a massive number of air purifiers136 and some days supposedly went off Obama’s life as he breathed Delhi’s air137. Meanwhile, Indian officials rejected WHO data, claiming (as WHO itself does), that it doesn’t indicate pollution crises. However, for the first time, air quality was communicated to the public by the National Air Quality Index brought out in October 2015. The NAQI showed PM levels to be very poor in most of Delhi’s locations. Civil society groups, armed with hand-held monitors, measured personal exposure to PM2.5. Air businesses flourished: masks, air purifiers and monitors saw increasing sales. The Delhi government ordered a slew of measures, including the hotly debated ‘odd and even scheme’, which many felt targeted vehicles and saw it as a political move to keep its ‘lower middle class’ vote bank safe (which travelled on two wheelers, they claimed). In this section, I attempt to disentangle some of the contestations involved here, asking three questions: How did PM2.5 become such an important issue? How was the NAQI conceptualized? On what claims do air businesses base their products? I then connect these threads through the lens of knowledge production and expertise: how did these particular knowledges evolve? And who was considered an expert and by whom?

3.2.1. Of particular concerns: Focus on PM

“PM2.5 is the most dangerous because it comes out of diesel, it comes out of thermal power plants…its something we can control…unlike construction, which is harder…” (Sunil Dahiya, Greenpeace)

“Why is PM2.5 important? Because of climate change. It doesn’t come out of tailpipes…that’s nonsense” (Dr. Sudesh Yadav, Scientist, JNU)

“Actually, nothing, nothing, what you see is what matters….other criteria like gases are not visible to you…ozone and nitrogen oxides…that’s the future” (Dr. M.P. George, Scientist, DPCC)

Everyone I talked to has an opinion on PM2.5: for most it is enemy number one, others dismiss it as just another component of a ‘toxic cocktail’, and some others see predict more ominous substances that would rule the public discourse. Also, different people and institutions point to different sources that contribute most to this matter. Natural conditions including residential sector-burning of waste and biomass by Ministry of Earth Sciences (Marrapu et al., 2014), road dust and fly-ash by IIT Kanpur (P. M. Sharma & Dikshit, 2016) and re-suspension of dust by vehicles (personal communication with Prof. Sudesh Yadav).

134 February 14, 2015. ‘Delhi’s air is often more polluted than Beijing’s’. New York Times 135 December 3, 2015. ‘Norway may classify New Delhi posting a ‘hardship’. The Hindu 136 February 2, 2015. ‘U.S. Embassy purchased over 1,800 purifiers before President Obama’s India visit’. Indian Express 137 January 26, 2015. ‘Mr. President, world’s worst air is taking 6 hours off your life’. Bloomberg

Civil society organizations and media houses point to vehicles as the largest source, meanwhile-numerous reports on PM2.5 have images of a long line of vehicles with masked children. So what exactly is particulate matter, and what is PM2.5?

According to US-EPA138, particles in the air-solid (smoke, dust, soot, liquid droplets)-all constitute particulate matter. They can remain suspended for long periods in the air and come in different sizes: some large enough to be seen with naked eye (like soot and dust), some so small that they can only be seen with an electron microscope (PM2.5, ultra-fine particles). Of these, particles with diameter less than 2.5 micrometres are called ‘fine particles’ or PM2.5. And they are very bad for your health-being smaller than the width of a human hair, they lodge deeply into lungs and refuse to budge. Apparently, long-term exposure leads to cardio-pulmonary diseases and death.

A search for ‘particulate matter’ in NCBI’s huge online database of published medical articles PubMed, gives 55,087 results. A further search for ‘PM2.5’ yields about four thousand articles. Clearly, particulate matter has been the focus of much academic scholarship. A study illustrating the evolution of PM2.5 measurements and standards in the U.S tells us that particulate got segregated by size only in 1972 using ‘newly developed instrumentation’ and further elaborated upon to give the following distribution of particle size and their sources(Cao, et al., 2013):

This figure shows that PM2.5 could mean three things: particles with upper limit 2.5 micrometers (diameter), particles with 2.5 as the lower limit and the entire range of particles below that limit. It only excludes the ‘coarse’ particles (also visible): geological material, pollen and sea salt. So, first, any health study concerning effects of TSP (Total Suspended Particles), RSPM (equivalent to PM10) or PM2.5 is going to talk about the sum of observable health effects from these three entities. Second, the study also tells us that rates of inhalation and lung function based on casts of human airways (since 1980s) and simulations of fluid dynamics (since 2009) have served as the basis for choosing PM10 and PM2.5 for regulation-

138 https://www3.epa.gov/pmdesignations/faq.htm#0

Figure 2. Ideal ambient particle distribution (Source: Cao et al, 2013)

and there is still a debate on choosing a cut-off point on this basis (with PM15 as a candidate, too).

In 1972, a study called ‘Small particles in air pose a big control problem’ was one of the first to comment on the health effects of these fine particles-it cited effects of aerosols on pulmonary function studies of guinea pigs as its epidemiological basis (Friedlander, 1973). However, correlations between ambient air data and health effects were lacking. The ‘Harvard Six Cities Study’ changed all that. Started in 1974 by a group of professors based in Harvard School of Public Health, it sampled around 8,000 adults and 14,000 children controlled for smoking and age in six U.S. cities differentiated by different levels of TSP, SO2, NO2 and ozone, among others-it published its results in 1994. It predicted that people lost two years of their lives in cities heavily dirtied by air pollution-which amounted to massive losses in a large population (D W Dockery et al., 1993).

The language used here was ‘association’ between air pollution and mortality (the particulate ‘agent’ being TSP), and with this, a measure for prognosis-living while dying-was established. Before this, health effects of air pollution studied a small cohort ( Pope, 1991) or peak pollution events like the London smog of 1952. This study of urban air and its health effects was one of a kind-it was said to be methodologically innovative, ingenious, comprehensive-and it is still running139. When criticized that this data for representative only for six cities and not for the entire country, the same group of scientists carried out a study of 151 U.S. metropolitan areas studying around 5 million adults-this was one of a kind multi-city analysis-still preferred today (Pope et al., 1995). The sample was derived from patients who had volunteered as part of an on-going program at the American Cancer Society (ACS) and henceforth was called the first ACS Multi-site study.

These studies are celebrated as a hallmarks of public health research and led to a change in US-EPA’s air quality standards-and as a result, were contested. Since the scientists had promised confidentiality to the respondents involved in the study which ran for twenty years, they didn’t release their data for three years, but under pressure from EPA and the U.S. Senate-gave it to Boston-based Health Effects Institute (HEI) in 1997. The same year, Clean Air Act regulations for PM2.5 and ozone became operational under Bill Clinton, with a clause to share data from federally funded projects to anyone who requested it under the Freedom of Information Act. In this study, under TSP-two cut-off points were established, for PM15 and PM2.5-beyond which 50% of particles of each penetrated the nose and the lung, respectively.

A re-analysis of the Six Cities Study was done by HEI which confirmed the findings, adding that ‘increased relative risk of mortality may be attributed to more than one component of the complex mix of ambient air pollutants in urban areas of the United States’(HEI, 2000). Epidemiological studies followed en-masse after this, and a critical review was published by the scientists of the Six Cities Study, adding that ‘fine particulate pollution plays a characteristic and measurable role on adversely affecting human health’, though with a caveat: ‘...one of the biggest gaps our knowledge relates to what specific air pollutants, 139 http://www.fluecube.com/harvard-six-cities

combinations of pollutants, sources of pollutants, and characteristics of pollutants are most responsible for the observed health effects’ ( Pope et al., 2006).

However, the original Six Cities study had such a huge impact, that in words of a Harvard School of Public Health’s online magazine article:

“Today, because of Six Cities, it is conventional wisdom that particulate matter contributes significantly to a wide variety of illnesses across the spectrum of life, from asthma and bronchitis to sudden infant death syndrome and lung cancer140”.

In the process of becoming ‘conventional wisdom’, particulate pollution has undergone two trends. First, it has become finer. From TSP to SPM to RSPM to PM10 to PM2.5-ever finer particles are responsible for cancer and other dreadful diseases, with ultra-fine particles (those with diameter less than 1 micron) being the new buzzword for scholarly publications. In words of a Clean Air Initiative-Asia (CAI-Asia) report, ‘TSP and black smoke were used as indicators of airborne particles in the past but TSP has lost relevance because these can be filtered by nose and mouth. PM10 and PM2.5 is preferred for more targeted response to the problems related with PM exposure as they are more dangerous to public health.’ However, as another study reminds us, PM2.5 as a regulatory concern also emerged from the vast number of epidemiological studies which used PM2.5 inlets for simulation-and since these were easily available in large numbers, PM2.5 became a cut-off point for US-EPA regulations (Cao et al. , 2013b).

Second, along with newer technologies for measurements, the vocabulary has shifted from ‘association’ to ‘risk’, included with words signifying prognosis. In its latest incarnation, particulate pollution was declared a Group 1 carcinogen by IARC with the words ‘reasonable grounds for concern that air pollution may increase the risk of lung cancer in combination with smoking and occupational exposures’ (International Agency for Cancer Research, 2013). This doesn’t prevent it from being prescriptive, however: it states that this applies all over the world, including developing countries. Though this has been a global and a multi-disciplinary effort (with atmospheric scientists, ecological economists and epidemiologists), most actors have been from the U.S., European Union, Japan and recently, China.

In India, as we have previously observed, particulate matter was not always the prime concern. In CSE documents, for example, particulate matter pollution is focused from 1996 onwards-and cites the Six Cities and ACS studies-but there too, particulate matter is eclipsed by other gaseous, equally invisible pollutants like oxides of nitrogen and sulphur. The first studies in India were carried out in the early 2000s and linked daily pollutant levels with OPD visits (Pande et al., 2002), role of ambient air in chronic respiratory morbidity (Chhabra et al., 2001) and other similar efforts (A. Kumar et al., 2001; Saksena et al., 2003). All these papers cite each other and the Six Cities/ACS studies. The next type of papers were published from 2008 onwards-on emission inventories differentiated according to sectors (transport, residential, commercial and so on) and calling for an air quality index for India(for example, see Maji, 2015; Marrapu et al., 2014; Mohan & Kandya, 2007).

140 http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/magazine/f12-six-cities-environmental-health-air-pollution/

Let us consider the titles of some articles that these papers cite:

‘Association of particulate air pollution with daily mortality: the China air pollution and health effects study’141

‘Air pollution and daily mortality in London’142

‘Air pollution and associated respiratory morbidity in Delhi’143

‘Ambient air pollution and chronic respiratory morbidity in Delhi’144

‘Particulate air pollution as a predictor of mortality in a prospective study of US adults’145

‘Change in pulmonary function in children associated with air pollution episodes’146

‘Modelling the association between particle constituents of air pollution and health outcomes’147

‘Measurements and analysis of criteria pollutants in New Delhi, India’148

‘Trends of particulate matter in four cities in India’149

‘Monitoring of air pollution in Indian Metropolitan cities: Modelling and quality indexing’150

Two subjects: ‘air pollution’ (or ambient air pollution or particulate air pollution) and an indicator of prognosis-morbidity/mortality/health outcomes are joined by a localizing predicate-China, US, Delhi, etc. Next, the structure of the papers related to Delhi begin with pollution being a result of increasing urbanization and industrialization of Delhi, its aspirations of a world-class city, then go on to cite different studies (with titles similar to mentioned above), and conclude with policy recommendations. Further, to differ from other cities, references to Delhi’s unique meteorological positioning are provided, and when there is a lack of data, references to other cities of India and abroad are provided as indicators.

This, along with the previous discussion shows that what becomes ‘conventional wisdom’ or a fact in newspaper discourses is a result of a continuous circulation of knowledge along multiple scales and actors. The citation network is both universalizing-it appeals to a universally accepted theme, method and syntax; and localizing by referring to particular condition of a place and climate. Thus, both universality and particularity are co-produced by citation networks. In Choy’s words, ‘Proliferation and accumulation of particulars is key to the citational network’s existence’(Choy, 2010).

141 (Chen et al., 2012) 142 (Anderson, et al., 1996) 143 (Jayaraman & Nidhi, 2008) 144 (Chhabra et al., 2001) 145 ( Pope et al., 1995) 146 (Douglas W. Dockery et al., 1982) 147 (Mostofsky et al., 2012) 148 (Aneja et al., 2001) 149 (Gupta & Kumar, 2006) 150 (Mouli et al., 2004)

This circulation also has a material infrastructure: measurements via samplers, use of size-selective PM inlets, reliance on national and international databases and the numerous institutions, journals and presentations that posit the ‘back-end’ of knowledge production as a final product. This materiality is important: we find that one of the factors that influenced PM2.5 as a choice for regulation was an availability of its inlet.

However, there is a significant amount of uncertainty attached (though that shouldn’t be taken as a measure of lack of scientific rigour). A review of the ‘Global burden of disease due to outdoor air pollution’ in 2006 says that: ‘ we have to make assumptions...such as the transferability of risk functions, exposure of the population, and its underlying vulnerability to air pollution, while trying to ensure that these assumptions are transparent’ (Cohen et al., 2006). Further, a review of scientific literature in India in 2016 lets us know that most work has done on PM as a whole, time-activity characterization is poor, a call for biomarker-based health assessments, and a need to control for ‘social’ variables such as gender and socio-economic status; noting that under the recently launched Smart Cities initiative, clean air is imperative (Guttikunda et al., 2016).

This network appears to be well-substantiated in print and while analyzing its syntax. It says-urban air is dangerous, it is morbid, it should be cleaned. But there is some resistance within this network. For example, while a lot of scientific literature connects PM2.5 focus to climate change (Black Carbon is a constituent of PM2.5 and has a role in increasing the greenhouse effect and hence climate change), some actors (e.g. HelpDelhiBreathe) persistently insist that the two discourses of climate change and air pollution be kept separate. Could this be seen as a move to localize the discourse further, since different actors are involved at different scales? Also, the comparison between Beijing and Delhi is interesting. Some actors (e.g. CSE, Greenpeace, media houses, HelpDelhiBreathe) constantly point to it, other actors (e.g. MoES, DPCC) are uncomfortable with this comparison. Consider this statement by the air pollution scientists of DPCC:

“They have the nearest sea port at 60 kms away, I have my nearest at 600 kms away. Is this taken into account? They have a very high mountain nearby. And I don’t have...here geography is different.”151

Recourse to geographical uniqueness of Delhi-a sort of reversal of the ‘tropical climate contributing to disease’ trope helps the scientist to position Delhi air’s as lacking of certain characteristics that make it have worse air than Beijing.

If Delhi is geographically differentiated with Beijing by him, then for many, it is a different kind of geography-of being in the Global South, of being developing countries, experiencing rapid consumerism and motorization-that makes Delhi’s and Beijing’s air commensurable. To do that, the above scientific discourse that could well be applied anywhere by its proponents is employed. This is apparent in documents of international organizations such as WHO and HEI: former divides countries to be assessed for air pollution monitoring efforts based on regional geography (Southeast Asia, Pacific, Eastern Mediterrenean) and income, 151 In-depth interview

whereas the rest has an entire program, PAPA (Public Health and Air Pollution in Asia); the World Bank also has a Clean Air Asia programme. Two factors become important for this geography: its poisonous urban air and its suffocating indoor air. Experiences of developed countries in controlling air pollution are recommended as policy solutions. These are appended by graphs and trends that aggregate data regionally to make their air comparable.

For example, an excerpt from a 2014 update to WHO Ambient Air Pollution database reads:

“PM10 levels show that South-East Asia has second-highest average-at 128… To compare levels of air pollution for an equivalent of a three-year average for cities present in both versions of the database, a linear interpolation or (rarely) an extrapolation was made”152

In a similar vein, a Clean Air Initiative-Asia’s document reads:

“Monitoring results reflects PM10 as a critical pollutant for most Asian cities. With recent scientific findings highlighting the significant health impacts of PM2.5, WHO and several developed countries, such as US and EU have established PM2.5 guidelines (for WHO) and standards (for US and European Union [EU])...Asian countries are slowly moving towards developing PM2.5 as well, but there is still a long way to go.”153

These comparisons are not only entextualized, they are also performed at various air pollution-related events. At the previously mentioned ‘Clean Air Conclave’, an expert from Beijing gave a presentation on lessons to be learnt from Beijing’s air pollution problems: similar problems, she said, merit similar solutions. Here, expertise and with it, ‘experience as knowledge’ was mobile-through her presence at the conference, through her presentation, and at a resulting discussion. Similarly, at another talk by an international air management consultant and a former CEO of CARB, California’s air was made comparable with Delhi’s through appeal to PM2.5, targeting of diesel, and technology (she announced: ‘technology would do the rest’). Thus, we see that when air is substantiated as a medical concern globally, locally and regionally, these substantiations rely on each other for stabilization and proliferation of that knowledge. These claims rely on making two different contexts commensurable-which is achieved by internationally mobile expertise (in person or through an object) deriving their scientific integrity and authority by being associated with important institutions and people, and by undergoing similar experiences. Does this blur advocacy and scientific objectivity?

3.2.2 NAQI: Focus on monitoring

India did not have an air quality index until 2010. That year, Delhi was to host the Commonwealth Games, and questions were raised by CSE on the basis of ‘international experts’ Daniel Greenbaum and Robert O’Keefe, former is President and CEO of HEI with degrees in city planning154, latter is VP of same organization. Together, they presented to CSE that athletes will breathe more pollutants with each gulp of air compared to ordinary

152 (WHO, 2014) 153 (CAI-Asia, 2010) 154 http://pdf.wri.org/bio_dan_greenbaum_1-11-12.pdf

people. Worse, their performance would be affected155. An year earlier, focus on Delhi’s air had begun. Jairam Ramesh, former union minister of MoEF had notified stricter standards in November 2009. It included eight criteria pollutants: SO2, NO2, PM10, PM2.5 (for the first time), O3, Lead, CO and ammonia, with their frequency and methods of measurement. A month earlier, it was announced that Delhi would have India’s first air forecasting system. A team of atmospheric scientists led by Dr. Gufran Beig of Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), based in Pune and serves as a research centre for Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES). This system was called SAFAR (System of Air Quality Research and Weather Forecasting and Research), entrusted to monitor Delhi’s air during the Games and beyond.

As one browses the media section of SAFAR’s website, most articles on Delhi are from 2009-11, about its association with the Games in 2010. We come to know that an extensive survey was carried out in Delhi and the system meant to guide organizers for efficient mitigation strategies was praised by the UN. Its AQI used a four category system: Good, Moderate, Poor, Dangerous (for 300+). These LED and LCD screens were located at twenty different locations across the cities, most near Games venues. However, the air quality didn’t improve-a newspaper clipping tells us that levels of PM were dangerously high at the venues. After the Games, SAFAR has continued to monitor Delhi’s air but it didn’t get quite the media coverage. Most of its newspaper clippings post- 2010 are about Pune or Mumbai. In 2010, for Delhi, SAFAR was perceived as a ‘breakthrough’, an innovative technology to not only monitor air, but to provide corridors of safe air for numerous athletes from all across the world who would see Delhi become a true metropolitan region.

In 2014, again, Delhi’s air was in news again as WHO had called it having the ‘world’s worst air’ and Obama’s breathing Delhi’s air for 2015 Republic Day to Delhi was said to take 6 hours off his life. In The NAQI (National Air Quality Index) was announced by MoEFCC and CPCB on 17 September 2014 with IIT Kanpur as ‘knowledge partners’ under the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, called the ‘One-Number One-Colour-One Description’. This spiralled a media discussion on AQI, and different organizations like Greenpeace and IndiaSpend launched their AQI apps for mobile phones. Together, they categorised Delhi’s air according to different categories and provided a way for being who could access them or understand them with health advisories.

Thus, the Air Quality Index (AQI) appears to be the most common way in which air is being substantiated in Delhi. It has a physical component-the monitoring stations employing physical infrastructures like high-volume samplers to measure a physical entity, i.e. air; its compilation dependent on a mathematical calculation which converts concentration into an index based on complex levels of abstraction of the linkages between concentration of a ‘pollutant’ and human health responses to it; it reveals an infrastructure through which production of knowledge in an urban space occurs

155 http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-air-pollution-could-hit-performance-of-athletes-in-commonwealth-games-ngo-1381505

This is reminiscent of one of the strategies of urban entrepreneurism and its association with place-making that Harvey (1989) discusses in context of advanced capitalist societies, and which Rademacher (2008) discusses in context of Kathmandu, where construction of public parks, even though occurring through demolition of squatter settlements in the shadow of militia, was associated with place-making and the state ‘in action’ during a moment of international attention (a SAARC meeting). It is argued that this transformation of the urban environment and its governance was made possible due to a chaotic experience of democracy in Nepal, legitimizing an authoritarian implementation of emergency. This is especially interesting if one views that the switch from using SAFAR to monitor Delhi’s air to using the AQI seems to have begun at a time when Obama visited India in 2014, and numerous newspaper articles were published under the headline ‘U.S. to monitor India’s air quality

Under this initiative, the U.S. Environment Protection Agency (US-EPA) aims to install an air monitoring and forecasting system called AirNow-International (AirNow as the parent system which provides air quality data for U.S., Canada, and Mexico), so that citizens and foreign nationals visiting India can take better decisions with respect to their exposure towards air and take appropriate precautions. This was framed under the theme of ‘empowerment’ of people as well as the importance of international collaboration to face global threats like climate change. It also legitimized its claims on having implemented similar systems with success in other cities facing similar problems (e.g. Beijing and Hong Kong)-hence air in Delhi is being substantiated by global forces which seek to make a city specific to a larger problem of air pollution, associating it ever-increasing umbrella terms of climate change and global warming. Though AirNow-International’s monitoring system is only installed in the U.S. Embassy in Delhi now, this moment of international attention and ensuing negotiations of climate change talks, combined with a failure to do anything about Delhi’s air post-CWG2010 could be perhaps be one of the reasons of why a nation-wide AQI was implemented by CPCB in 2014.

These legitimacy claims are supported by a complex, international infrastructure of knowledge, implying that citational networks with their various knowledge claims and epistemological bases are involved in the construction of the AQI. In this context and the above discussions, it is useful to look at the structure of the AQI in Delhi, which says a lot about its construction. The NAQI (National AQI) that was launched in 2014 is completely based on the US-EPA AQI, which has its own long history since its first implementation in the U.S. in 1976.This is how the structure looks:

Figure 3. NAQI (Source: Final Report on NAQI, CPCB, 2014-15)

Another image shows its association with health effects:

This is what is meant by ‘One-Number One-Colour-One Description’: A number corresponding to a particular concentration is rendered subjectively in diagnostic urgency of varying degrees (e.g. Good, Poor, Severe), showing associated health impacts, recommending interventions-visually represented through color coding-with green as safe and red as the time to panic. The Final Report compiled with the CPCB in collaboration with IIT Kanpur relies on US-EPA methods to calculate the scale of conversion from concentration of a substance to the AQI. This conversion is done for each pollutant that a monitoring station is able to measure, leading to sub-indices for each pollutant when averaged (e.g. over 8 hours, 24 hours, or annually)-the worst sub-index of them all is the AQI of that locality. This conversion is done using C-R (Concentration-Response) functions, which is how the US-EPA carries out risk assessments for its AirNow systems. C-R functions combine air quality changes, affected populations, and information regarding the expected per person change in incidence per unit change in pollutant level- a health risk model is created using air quality monitoring data and C-R (concentration/response) functions based on human epidemiological studies. The model also considers baseline data and air quality adjustment procedures. It is then used to imagine alternative scenarios and estimate recent air quality. The study itself acknowledges two sources of uncertainty-one based on a Monte Carlo procedure which ensures randomization of the samples in the modelling calculations, and the other due to substantial differences in the finding of different case studies. Other source is that the estimate number of years lost would by default include a majority of people over the age of 65. The study also failed to identify any thresholds-or safe levels of air pollution-this implies that air pollution could have effect even at zero ambient levels, technically. The report also says that the duration of the lag period-starting of exposure and onset of effects is unclear, and has hence modelled risk assessment based on different lag period-extending from no lag to a 15-year lag, and use a discount rate for each period (EPA Report to Congress, November 1999).

Figure 4. Health advisory in NAQI (Source: Final Report on NAQI, CPCB, 2014-15)

This implies that the technical calculation of the AQI is abstracted on every level of its production, and depends on some unknown or standardized coefficients or constants, that are themselves dependent on different case studies. Further, insights from these case studies in the U.S., Canada, or Mexcio, are applied to direct policy interventions in Delhi, which is situated in a completely different geography and climate, prone to seasonal variations in dust affecting the concentration of particulate matter. How relevant would such an application be in Delhi, especially when one number should be supposedly used to directly engage in matters of body and health? Also, the NAQI uses the ‘maximum operator’ approach, i.e. it chooses the worst sub-index among the different pollutants as the AQI of a city and perhaps, would not really represent the correct information that citizens might want for specific interventions, creating an ‘atmosphere of red alerts’. This is besides the fact that several fingers have been raised at the NAQI soon after its implementation, questioning if its AQI numbers can be trusted (e.g. Rajshekar, M; October 14, 2014; Economic Times).

This is also important as it is exactly the data from these monitoring stations that the World Health Organization (WHO) uses to set interim targets for ‘break-point’ values that are represented in the AQI chart above. A reading of the document on the methods used to arrive at these values (WHO’s Ambient Air Pollution Databse- Update 2014) reveals a ‘disclaimer’: the interpretation of the data lies solely with the reader, due to a large number of biases (different location of monitoring stations, different measurement methods, different temporal scale of coverage, ‘possible inclusion of data which were not eligible for the database to ensure compliance’, different sizes of the city, heterogeneous measurement quality, ‘omission of data due to language barrier or limited accessibility’). It also mentions that these have been modeled on the databases of the US-EPA (which itself cites the WHO database as its source), with India’s data coming from CPCB. If one goes to CPCB’s website where ‘real-time air quality data’ is streaming, it points its source from the expert study carried out by CPCB mentioned above, as well as US-EPA and WHO databases. This is perplexing: the actors involved (e.g. US-EPA, CPCB, WHO, etc.) seem to rely on each other to substantiate knowledge claims about a set of data whose technical and conceptual production has already been rendered problematic. These are some of the complexities involved I came across while examining the construction of the Air Quality Index. This appropriately fits the patterns evoked by Choy (2010) in his study of Hong Kong, that the construction of air as a medical and a public fact relies on both a localizing and a globalizing context: the AQI is based on inter-dependent knowledge claims made by international bodies, appropriated by national bodies in their structural form by invoking specificity. Also, the connection between technology and body is made via ‘living in prognosis’, i.e. counting the number of years left due to exposure, which can be used to support broad and vaguely implementation, whereas perhaps the most effective interventions would be bodily-this is evoking the body, yet deferring in its intervention by focusing on ‘pollutants’ whose dynamics can be controlled. As he says, it is ‘an aesthetic technology with serious stakes’. It is now little over a year that the AQI was launched. On its first anniversary, Greenpeace India’s Sunil Dahiya released a blog-post titled ‘Analysing NAQI platform’, contrasting claims made by CPCB during its launch in 2015 and its current status156. It critiques the NAQI for not integrating more continuous monitoring stations (despite claiming that all 46 156http://www.greenpeace.org/india/en/Blog/Campaign_blogs/analysing-the-effectiveness-of-the-national-a/blog/56069/

cities with more than 1 million population and 20 state capitals would have such stations within an year), reports generated are as early as of October 2015 on CPCB website (however, DPCC releases daily reports from its CAAQMS), that many stations (like ITO) do not display PM2.5, PM10, which considering their adverse health impacts, are necessary to compute AQI for Delhi. It then gives suggestions to upgrade manual stations to automatic continuous ones, distribution of data to various media outlets, issuing real-time health advisories, formulate a robust system for checking excess in system, grant users access to archive data to permit comparisons between cities and an urgent regional and national plan to clean air. Earlier, it had also taken out a report titled ‘Clean Air Action Plan: The way forward’. It compared India and China’s pollution levels, stating that for the first time in 2015, India’s air was more polluted than China’s, and that the latter had kept it controlled due to a comprehensive regional and national action plans. The methodology they used was aerosol optical depth measurements from NASA MODIS satellite, ‘a widely used proxy for PM2.5 levels’ which doesn’t capture local patterns but gives regional pictures. On this basis, they generated three maps: the first map of 2005 showed China to be more polluted than India; in 2011, the situation had deteriorated in both, and in 2015, India the situation had reversed compared to 2005 levels. This report was called as having ‘extrapolated constructed data and lacking field validation’ by MoEFCC minister Prakash Javadekar157.

Further, not everyone considers AQI to be scientific. Consider this statement made by Prof. Yadav of JNU:

“AQI is only advisory in nature. Its not scientific. As scientists, we work with data and want to be confident about what we say…But an advice is different from science. You can do whatever you want. What is the science behind this? I don’t know. The WHO standard for PM2.5 is totally ridiculous! I don’t know on what basis they have calculated that. Even in Barack Obama’s house, air quality will be at least twice that value. Its incredible…”158

This lack of confidence in AQI is stated to arise from its lack of following a ‘scientific method’ and apparently, advisory cannot be based on ‘hard science’. This shows a gap between conceptualizing of air in atmospheric science and public health science. Though both are solidified by long-term monitoring and epidemiological studies and have various assumptions, latter has to position air as a medical concern for a larger public, which would obviously involve more scientific uncertainty, as we have seen.

157 ‘Government downplays NGO report on air pollution’. 158 In-depth interview

3.2.3. Air entrepreneurs: Masks, Filters, Purifers

I attended a ‘Clean Air Fair’ organized by Help Delhi Breathe in April 2016. Its poster speaks volumes:

A woman covers her mouth to prevent from breathing Delhi’s toxic air. The text doesn’t quite well go with the image: its going to be an evening of music and entertainment with ‘leading experts’ and demonstrations of solutions to the air crisis. The address is that of a high-end shopping complex located in South Delhi; not everyone goes there. When I go to the Fair, school children of the British School in Delhi offer to sell me home-made cupcakes, cookies and biscuits, telling me that the money would go for buying masks for ‘poor street children’. By 5 p.m. on April 23, the Fair is set-up, and as ‘experts’-owner of NirvanaBeing Jai Dhar Gupta, member of URJA Ashutosh Dikshit and Greenpeace activist Sunil Dahiya give speeches, the crowd starts to gather. Some leave, muttering that it is boring. However, a music band is going to perform now. The stage is all set, a live air pollution monitor showing PM2.5 levels tells me that air quality is well within the safe standards of ‘Good’. As a smokescreen is let out to start the band’s performance, PM2.5 levels increase rapidly, oblivious to everyone. The crowd gathers fast now, and the band starts to sing: ‘Who am I? What is my essence? Why do I exist?’

Such existential lyrics ironically fit well with the Fair’s take-home message: the air crisis is bad, you are living precariously, and we have solutions that will help you. Earlier in the day, I visited every stall demonstrating air purifiers, hand-held, ‘low-cost’ PM2.5 monitors, and assorted masks. When air has been established as a medical concern and its monitoring as a tool to disseminate information, organize protests and demand for action, it is not surprising that businesses promoting these products which claim to produce a ‘leak-free’, ‘smoke-free’ city will proliferate. What is interesting is what strategies they use to market these products, and whom they target. In this context, I collected brochures from every stall; it is illustrative what they say (ones I mentioned here are attached in Annexure I).

Figure 5. Poster of Clean Air Fair (Source: Facebook)

One company, Vogmask, sells air-filtering masks designed by Manish Arora, priced at Rs. 2,000 onwards; leading one article to call this ‘breathless chic’159. These are N99 masks, claiming to filter 99% of PM2.5 particles entering one’s nose. It is tested by an ‘independent lab’, Nelson Labs of America (based in Utah) which provides biotechnology testing services for medical technology companies. These are the only ‘high performing masks for children and babies’. On the back of a brochure are reasons by this is the number 1 mask recommended by paediatricians and chest physician around the world, followed by an AQI table and details about its products.

‘Smartness’ is another adjective used by these businesses. iTechnik is a company producing smart air purifiers which asks potential consumers to ‘live smart’ and breathe life again. Its products are named iFuture, iPulse, iBreeze and iMove (for different usage areas)-evoking another company that is known for its intelligent design. Its partners are Foxconn (makers of Apple iPhones), and they have been engineered by ‘vast research in USA, Finland, Germany, England, China and India’. They tell me that I won’t find air purifiers so stylish and smart. I ask them the cost of the car purifier iMove-it is more than Rs. 10,000.

Another company using this adjective calls itself ‘Smart Air’; its tagline being ‘innovating affordable clean air’. Moreover, it is a social enterprise, telling consumers that they can build their own air purifiers for Rs. 3,399, and all one needs to remove air is a HEPA (high-efficiency particulate arrestance) filter and a fan. When I ask them what makes them different from other stalls there, they tell me: “All these products you see here-iTechnik, Atlanta-they are just re-packaging Chinese goods. We build in India and sell in India, our products are low-cost and designed for Indian conditions’.

But they aren’t the only ones appealing to national territory. Swachh Air, a start-up, is selling air purifiers at Rs. 3,000, and claim to produce the world’s most affordable air purifier. Its brochure is interesting: a collage of newspaper clippings pronouncing Delhi as a ‘death zone’ goes on to tell about impacts of air pollution, air quality and dismiss other technologies on various grounds: air conditioners (only filter visible particles), ozone based purifiers (they produce ozone), air sterilizers (don’t filter out PM2.5), Chinese air purifiers (unreliable, unattractive, ineffective), HEPA-based purifiers (expensive). When I ask them how they are different, they tell me it is completely made in India and that they are even looking for funding under the ‘Make in India’ scheme (other businesses want to do the same, some even have ‘Make in India’ written in big letters on their stalls). They show me a prototype of their product: it looks like a filter attached to a fan placed on a wooden board, and jokingly tell me, “Hey, we have just started! By the way, we are software engineers so air engineering took us time, we just started exploring and soon we had made so much investment that it would have been stupid to not make it a business…so we left our high-paying jobs to get into this social enterprise’.

Yet other businesses dismiss these companies as being ‘mere start-ups’ and position themselves as being long players in the air market. They state that no reliable purifier can cost below Rs. 10,000 and point to expertise and technology from other countries for 159 http://scroll.in/article/801938/breathless-chic-how-delhi-is-fighting-air-pollution-in-style

validating their claims. Some even go further. For example, Atlanta Healthcare’s product iCluster has not one, or even two filters, but a nine step synchronized filtration system that sequentially filters coarse particles (dust, pollen, hair), very fine particles, molecular sieve for gases, activated carbon for bad odour, cold catalyst for further removing ‘’harmful gases’, a photo catalyst for removing allergens, mildew and infectants, and a UV filter for neutralizing microbes. At the end, you get clean and fresh air, completely free from any danger whatsoever. This is how one gets air that is leak-free and smoke-free. And the cheapest model called ‘Tornado Pure’ costs one Rs. 8, 590. Their stall at the Fair is also the largest and has an Instagram counter where they make you write a message for people and post it on Instagram (you can win some goodies this way). They gave me a lot of brochures and a hat, to boot.

On asking about their association with Help Delhi Breathe, some tell me that they are friends with the members, know them personally, or got in touch via a proposal. Apart from air businesses, stalls of hybrid and electric cars, energy-friendly e-rickshaws and NGOs like Swechha (it is selling plants though, now, under the label ‘urban gardening’) and Greenpeace are also present. Some stalls (for example, AirVeda, which designs air monitors) make it clear that they only cater to a specific section (5-star hotels, gym/yoga studios, families with small children and individuals with respiratory problems). They too, claim to have left well-paying jobs to enter into a business that’s also a social enterprise.

Thus, it seems like air businesses are thriving on small differences in technology yet position themselves as deriving expertise from different geographies which validate their scientific objectivity. Together, they seem to say: continue living the way you were before, but not without our products. They aim to create sanitized urban environments only within the reach of a few, being neither sustainable nor equitable, despite claiming to be social enterprises. Paradoxically, they claim to purify air and their claims are substantiated by heavy campaigning, yet, they rely on continuation of pollution for sale. These attempts to sell air, an invisible hybrid entity, happens through the establishment of a crisis and is continued on its inevitability.

However, though they try to capture polluted air directly, they have not escaped criticism. Dr. George compares these to just another fad, akin to using RO (reverse-osmosis) based processes for purifying water:

“Mask becomes ad-hoc for culture…I am totally against the mask, because I don’t know if its usable or not. In 80s and 90s, everyone was using Eureka water filter…slowly we went to RO. We are wasting 70% of water there. We even put ROs in the Delhi Jal Board water. It is scientifically useless. When was the last time you serviced it? I don’t know if the candles are working or not, if its saturated. They put active charcoal in there, that has a shelf life. Are you even changing it? So its just a psychological thing, that I am getting my water from RO. Similarly, for HEPA, what is the effective area? Is there any study for that? How will it re-circulate? I don’t know. Still, in my house, there is no purifier.”160

160 In-depth interview

Some are even more direct. Prof. Yadav agrees:

“It is nonsense. Tell me, as a student of environment and development, tell me how you can believe that they work. They don’t work at all. It is a myth. Don’t be fooled by all this.” 161

Thus, there are definite objections to the use of these purifiers and masks. As for monitors, DPCC and CPCB hold that unless monitors are US-EPA verified and average out data to control for complex dynamics of ambient air, they only show data without a baseline or controlling for climate, they cannot be called scientific, no matter their claims to be informed about personal exposure.

4. Shift of Discourse

In this section, I will briefly discuss the differences in media reporting based on newspaper analyses of an English daily Times of India, in the 1990s and now, noting the vocabularies and concepts that were popular then and now. Surely, any description of differences is preliminary and limited. Much has changed, including the source of news: TV (various channels), internet, newspaper applications on mobile phones, newspapers and radios.

In the 1990s, Delhi’s air was often compared in news reporting with the 1984 Bhopal Gas Tragedy and the Shriram Gas Leak of 1985. The power of chemicals to destroy life and put thousands of lives at risk was also increasingly acknowledged. Also, air was explicitly formulated along the nature/culture binary: industries as culture were polluting and meant to be out of the city; the city once beautiful had to be restored, nature had to be brought back to the city. Also, air was understood to be highly technical, its knowledge out of the reach of the public and newspaper clippings just quoted scientists or spokespersons. This was also the time when groups like CSE advertised their campaigns through newspapers. Scientific contestations came to a matter of public debate. Most importantly, newspapers presented themselves as being objective and unbiased towards any side.

These features continue today, but with some differences. First, polls and surveys are now used to establish public perceptions about air. Second, there is a demand to know ‘real-time’ data, translating the multiple facets of an issue into one number, i.e. AQI. Third, newspapers now position themselves as advocacy groups, giving out recommendations and action plans. This is termed as ‘data journalism’. Fourth, the metaphor is no longer to bring nature back to the city, but to produce isolated and expensive domes of clean air, where one can monitor their personal exposures and use products that perpetuate these domes.

In a discussion organized by Help Delhi Breathe between journalists and ‘experts’, some of these issues were faced: What is lost during when ‘scientific jargon’ is translated by this kind of data journalism? Do we let readers set the agenda? Terms like ‘broccoli v. fast food journalism’ were used to answer the latter question: if readers want fast food (readers setting the agenda), we cant give them that because that’s bad for them; hence we will give them broccoli (objective advocacy), which is good for health. Another term ‘hashtag-ism’ was used to point towards tendencies of journalists to demand for real-time data, which scientists claim 161 In-depth interview

is the biggest problem with media today162. Also, it was pointed out that print journalism generates more revenue compared to online journalism and the latter are given to interns or newcomers in the newspaper industry. Thus, critiques of current practices of journalism are also a part of the public discourse these days.

To understand this more, I interviewed a Times of India journalist who had been writing reports on air pollution . When I asked her how is it decided what the public should read, she responded:

“The editors. ToI also has a brand team and they decide When a certain story is important, when we see that change can happen, if run it in campaign mode, we might get some results. So it depends on the importance of the story, what editors think”

This is explicit positioning as an advocacy group. When I asked her what she asks scientists, and about jargon translation, she answered:

“My job is only to understand from the scientists whether we are in the safe zone…and if we are not in the safe zone. I say that in very simple language. We do carry a lot of graphics and data, which may be a little technical for readers, but, it’s a visual thing where you can understand if you look at the graph”

However, this assumes that the reader knows how to interpret visual data. When I point this out, she says:

“I think it is wrong to assume that the reader is thick, that he doesn’t understand anything. We have a very diverse readership. Our readership is ridiculous. We have the newly literate, and we have the professors and the scientists. So you have to ensure that you are speaking to the entire range, but you can’t lower the standards to speak only to the lowest common denominator”

This implies that the readership is perceived to be distributed along a spectrum of literacy (intermingled with expertise), and that the newspaper cannot ‘lower its standards’ to speak to the ‘lowest common denominator’. It is left hanging what is meant by this latter term. Clearly, this information is not for everyone (not just because it is English, but because it translates scientific practices that might not be accessible for everyone), but is packaged as such. A speaker at the above-mentioned conference had jokingly added that one Times editor was inconvenienced by his morning jog at Lodhi Gardens and started a campaign to clean Delhi’s air.

What do these environmental discourses in the media tell imply? For this, let us place this discourse in the wider media environmental discourse as elucidated in the introductory chapter of Environmental Risks and The Media (Allan et al. , 2000). They point out that public discourses about the environment changed forever in 1969 when images of the Earth as a globe were relayed from the moon’s surface, blurring the traditional categories of

162 Both scientists I interviewed agreed to this. ‘Bite’ journalism, they say, leads to miscommunication between the public and the scientific domain.

reporting where effects of culture were adversely seen on nature (other species); now, human beings were themselves positioned at a risk for extinction. This called for a revision of reportage concepts and an ‘environmental story’ was coined as aving ‘business-medical-scientific-economic-social-pollution’ aspects that defied institutional categorization-this called for quoting of ‘experts’ who could give bites on various technical and scientific information, leading to bite journalism.

Till the 1980s, environmental reportage concentrated on industrial disasters (Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Bhopal gas Tragedy, Exxon Valdez oil spill) that made the ‘human element’ in news extraordinary due to the extent of damages and the outcome involved. This also made journalism event-centred, as opposed to issue-centred, as environmental threats which appear over a long time were ignored. However, in the 1990s, this transformed as global warming, climate change and greenhouse effect (both issue-centric and event-centric) became dominant environmental discourses. Moreover, their effects are spread in time and space, they are inherently unpredictable and uncertain, and cannot be compensated or insured against. These are characteristics of Beck’s ‘risk society’ (Beck, 1992), where environmental issues structure social formations. As the risk society encounters invisible, uncertain hazards, it seeks to legitimize and control them, with the anxiety that they are beyond the reach of institutions.

This positions journalism as a crucial important translator of information between scientists and the lay public. Just as they encounter issues which defy institutional rationalization and intellectual traditions of knowledge, their vocabulary remain trapped by these rationalities. For reconciliation, then, a story of prognosis is formed: one where scientific uncertainty and languages of probability are replaced by stories of dying and living simultaneously, and public health scientists and economists become important experts. The story of Delhi’s air follows some of these broad patterns. In the 1990s, there was a clear target-industries and diesel, and these were moved out of the city. Scientists were often relied upon to impart technical knowledge and these were imparted en-text to the public, structured around ‘environment v. livelihood’ binary per se. Now, it is hard to pin-point the target, and focus on monitoring and surveillance along with demands for data and advocacy journalism centres the discourse on prognosis, a characteristic of a risk society.

5. Bourgeious environmentalism and neoliberalism

Delhi’s 1990s has been read as a case of bourgeious environmentalism, where the middle-class and state-judiciary nexus led to relocation of industries and forced conversion of engines, displacing the livelihoods of industrial workers (Baviskar, 2003; Véron, 2006)and increasing the debt of autorickshaw owners-drivers who could not afford the change towards CNG engines and lost out to an emergent class of owners who engaged these drivers into contractual labour (Kumar, 2004). However, this violence over an environmental aesthetic and an aspirations towards that aesthetic (and imagining of the city as environmentally aesthetic) collide and subjects (i.e. those displaced or marginalized) respond to this by creative processes-of negotiating with local politicians, securing water and electricity bills to lay claim to Delhi and collective mobilization through workers’ unions and organizations. How does this happen?

James Scott, in Seeing like the State (Scott, 1999)argues that the modernist state deploys instruments of scientific rationality and expertise to construct a legible reality that it aims to control and improve (its narrow vision), yet fails because it doesn’t consider the complexities of local social or ecological processes. This vision makes sense if we consider the two Master Plans: together, they aim to partition Delhi’s air and expand its toxicity outside; at the same time, DMP-2001 utilizes Delhi’s ‘polluted atmosphere’ to outsource its power supply and continue its regional development scheme. However, it also articulates itself as sympathetic to the sufferings of workers who would lose their meagre livelihoods-in the wake of SC’s final order of closure, street protests and pressures from factory owners and workers were successful in laying non-legal claims to the city, articulated through multiple practices of mobilization and evasions (Sharan, 2014; p. 209).

English dailies reported that industries just continued to function, pointing to ‘corrupt’ officials and politicians163 and factory owners manufactured papers for electricity and water connections before 1990 (Sharan, 2014; p. 209). In an interesting turn of events, an SC order dated January 7, 2004 gave provisions for de-sealing of sealed units (with some caveats), with the govt. of NCT of Delhi issuing a notification for revised guidelines to do so164. Scott’s analysis doesn’t explain this aftermath. If an instrumental rationality and an ignorance of ‘everyday realities’ is the state’s way of seeing, what can we read from the legitimization of these subaltern claims to the city?

Chatterjee (2004) formulates a binary between the ‘imagination’ of the modern state, and the actual practice of governance-‘governmentality’ to explain such instances. Whereas the modern state must construct citizens in its claims to legitimacy, in practice, it deals with populations, not citizens. Hence, to govern, it has to negotiate with what he calls the ‘political society’, which is different from civil society in that it is constitutive of those populations outside the bounds of legalities, and who mobilize not as citizens, but as populations. The result is that strategic, even temporary alliances form between these populations on whose popular support the post-colonial state rests. This point has been made in an analysis of the ‘environmental turn’ of the judiciary in context of industrial relocation and what possibilities that opens for such negotiations, on which the urban poor’s material and political economy depends (Negi, 2010)

But, Sheila Dikshit, in claiming that the judiciary ignores ‘ground realities’, employs this critique: there are populations to negotiate with at one hand, and consumers who cannot be stopped from buying a car at another165. The state positions itself at the intersection of populations and consumers: it employs both the particularizing construct of the ‘population’, and the universalizing construct of the ‘consumer’. As Choy asks, what happens when both particularizing and universalizing frameworks are appropriated as government rationalities? (Choy, 2010)

163 January 24, 2004. ‘Govt. stumped on polluting industries’. The Hindu 164 http://dsiidc.org/dsidc/revisedguidelines.pdf 165 http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/death-by-breath-you-have-to-understand-there-are-various-lobbies-says-sheila-dikshit/

Moreover, as we see in the AAP government’s articulations, it actively works to transform populations into ‘environmentally conscious citizens’, and aims to make governmentality visible, by institutionalizing its various forms (whereas its subversive forms make political society possible), relying on its ‘clean’ image and ‘participatory’ schemes (which might be accessed only by those who are social media-literate). As Chatterjee (2004) points out, this is what ‘Western’ modern states have always done, whereas post-colonial states rely more on subversive practices. What does this point to?

Can it be argued that the current discourse has led to a reversal of bourgeois environmentalism, since the visible target (via policies such as odd-even) are vehicles this time, apparently a symbol of the aspirational middle class?166 Is the discourse more democratized? It certainly seems so when we look at the claims of this government, and at conferences where fingers are pointed towards ‘migrants’ burning wastes illegally as a counter-factual to the rationale for the odd-even scheme. This is also apparent from the way this government communicates with Delhi’s residents-through advertisements and appeals via personal calls on mobile and radio broadcasting, and through its billboards where it never forgets to be proud of the ‘benevolent, common people’ of Delhi who obediently followed this scheme. Obviously, when 50% of vehicles (ideally) are off Delhi’s roads, it would reduce pollution for a day (reflecting in the averages if done over a long time) and would relieve congestion, making it easier for cyclists and pedestrians.

However, less visible forms of pollution control strategies tell a somewhat different story. The Delhi government has an app and a helpline where one can register complaints about illegal waste burning, and it has started vacuuming roads (with no questions asked on its eventual dumping. One can only surmise that it will land up in one of Delhi’s landfill-mountains). Thus, this government cleverly negotiates middle-class anxieties with a legitimate concern for equity.

Also, as Mawdsley argues, the concept of the ‘middle-class’ needs to questioned: is it qualified by its size, its demands on consumption and natural resources, its anxieties as in-between the slum and global economic and cultural transactions? (Mawdsley, 2004). Also, this nexus may be temporal and not as static as that conceptualized earlier.

A discussion on bourgeoisie environmentalism and its critiques inevitably leads one towards capitalism and its most recent form, neoliberalism. Capitalism and urbanization are intimately linked through generation and absorption of surplus value: capital arises and perpetuates through generation of surplus product and surplus value which has to be re-invested to generate even more value and profits. In such a process, the capitalist encounters barriers of geography, technology, and demography: new terrains and raw materials must be explored, innovation must create new technologies, and new markets must be found and created (Harvey, 2008). Harvey argues that cities, being the centres of production, consumption and mobilizing capital, have served to absorb surplus value.

166 I am grateful to a commentator for asking me this question during my final viva for the dissertation.

Moreover, urbanization not only drives the production and absorption of surplus capital, it also shifts centres of risk associated with the inherent instability of capitalism-the cycle of booms and busts get transferred as urban centres invest in property and natural resources in other or upcoming urban centres. Inequality is thus produced and reproduced as spaces become formally controlled in a few hands. Seen in combination with bourgeoisie environmentalism, capitalism in urban contexts would produce inequalities that are driven by values and aesthetics of a particular class. In the global south, neoliberalism has been seen from the lens of ‘world systems theory’ and its affiliate, dependence-theory, where countries seeking aid or undergoing financial crises in 1990s opened up their markets in response to the Washington Consensus between IMF, World Bank and US Treasury Department and the Millenium Development Goals of the World Bank (which position development to be led by market forces; though there has been a re-thinking in these institutions after a decade of failures167).

However, urban environmentalism within the city that imagines it to be global might also lead to a neoliberal re-ordering of urban space (Negi, 2010). This is certainly true in case of 1990s Delhi, where land released after relocation of industries was used for property development and retail; thus highlighting the fact different instruments of capital might have uneven outcomes in a place. But, as discussed in previous sections, what form of capitalism do air businesses signify? Unlike industries which are visibly polluting and can be relocated to the ‘outskirts’ to make a pollution-free global city abounding in property and retail, these businesses crucially depend on the continuation of that pollution. Thus, it makes sense for them to wear the mantle of environmental activism and position Delhi’s air as a crisis that can be helped by their products. These are not mere attempts to commodify a ‘pure, clean’ resource which can then be exploited and depleted and are a public good, but it commodifies a surplus of pollution. In a discussion on the neoliberalization of nature, Castree states that neoliberalism is not triumphant when it encounters increased environmental problems due to heightened exploitation and when moral economies form to justify collective good, led by an interventionist state (Castree, 2010). Air as a commodity, especially attempts to sell polluted (and with it, clean) air, doesn’t seem to agree to these statements. How, then, to conceptualize this? More thought is needed at this front.

Since both urban environmentalism and air businesses rely heavily on claims of expertise, as has been discussed in the previous sections, the next section will tie-up these claims in a historical perspective of expertise and knowledge production.

6. Expertise & Associations

In the introduction to Scientists’ Expertise as Performance: Between State and Society, 1860-1960, the editors illustrate the history of expert practices. The early modern period (16th-18th) centuries presents the emergence of expertise as an outcome of a negotiation between the expert and the audience, especially as expertise had not become embedded in specialized university departments, scientific societies and state bureaus. Expert encounters, then, were 167 (World Bank, 2005). ‘Economic Growth in the 1990s: Learning from a decade of reform’. Derived from http://www1.worldbank.org/prem/lessons1990s/chaps/frontmatter.pdf

carefully crafted negotiations between patrons and the public. This role playing and negotiating character of an expert was configured again in the late 19th century, when more opportunities arose for state-backed expertise as the state aimed to control more aspects of public and private life, and academic institutions transformed traditional expert crafts and disciplines. We see expert performances in this period loaded with utopian visions of state, society and ideology of their disciplinary framework. These factors shaped the emergence of ‘modern technoscience’ , which was a two-sided process: As state expansion generated more avenues for expertise, processes of standardization of academic rigour and disciplinary specialization legitimated expert interventions (Vandendriessche et al. , 2015).

Three characteristics of ‘modern technoscience’ emerge here. Firstly, whereas early modern experts claimed to possess abstract, theoretical knowledge and dismissed practical experience as emerging from personal interests, modern experts relied on scientific method and accompanying objectivity to position themselves. This was supported by affiliation with ‘independent’ scientific societies and publications. Secondly, experts were more embedded in political and institutional affiliations. They became an integral part of power structures, full-time employees of state. This again required careful performances of credibility because they had to take a ‘middle-ground’ between their affiliation of state-sponsored projects and claims of scientific objectivity. Thirdly, political ideologies and expertise became enmeshed. The conviction that science and technology could hark social change and scientific development would beget social improvement, led to evolution of experts from advisers to reformers. Even though they claimed to transcend political motivations, they became integral in political projects (Vandendriessche et al. , 2015).

Seen in this historical perspective, we can clearly see that expertise is a negotiated outcome between interactions of state, society and science-which are themselves assemblages of people, concepts, models, initiatives and techniques that define knowledge production. How does Delhi’s air fit into this? In the 1990s and today, expert committees were/are appointed to deal with the ‘technical nature’ of air. Both the judiciary and the state have appointed such committees (e.g. EPCA, Mathur committee etc.) and relied on its members to guide recommendations and policy solutions. Some individuals, like M.C. Mehta and Anil Agarwal proved to be quite influential via their associations with committees through litigation, which requires judicial expertise to appeal on behalf of a ‘public’(MC Mehta was a member of the Saikia committee and Agarwal a member of EPCA).

This fits neatly into the ‘rule of experts’ framework elucidated by Mitchell where a modernist state employs technologies and expertise backed by claims of scientific objectivity and produces the science with the practices. As EPCA presented different public health studies conducted in Delhi and elsewhere to position CNG as superior to low-sulphur diesel, they, via their association with the judiciary, were also legitimizing that science and putting it in practice in Delhi. That knowledge was itself produced through a circulation of expertise and citational networks across different scales. However, that expertise produced unequal outcomes, as we have discusses before.

The current discourse, in contrast, is focused on prognosis and contestations about expertise within different groups. Whereas civil society groups contend that the government doesn’t monitor air enough and tends to obfuscate data to suit AQI categories, government agencies hold those groups’ hand-held monitors and techniques as unscientific. These concern are mostly related to averaging of ambient air levels-with government agencies preferring annual averages as indicative of a pollution problem and civil society groups preferring immediate, real-time data to monitor personal exposure and take suitable action. Thus, both are valid sciences in their own right, but are employed by different actors based on their agendas and motives.

Also, as we have seen with the citational network of PM2.5 and construction of the AQI context, questions are raised when a ‘Western’ science is applied in a local context (Pigg, 2001). Hence to produce commensurability (or to contest it), a recourse to geography (located in Southeast Asia) and territory (Mahony, 2013) is employed through entextualization and inscription (production of documents by WHO, CAI-Asia, HEI) and performance of international experts who position Delhi’s air as commensurable to Beijing’s, or even California’s. This is helped by objects such as images, maps, and posters that position Delhi’s air as poisonous and inform subjects’ understanding of air (Abe, 2012). For example, NASA satellite images used by Greenpeace India helped to compare India’s and China’s air, AQI used all over the world use the same colours and similar categories to produce universal commensurability of air.

Further, we see in CSE’s case that its activism around Delhi’s air in the 1990s has helped to position itself as a regional actor who tie Delhi to other cities, even as they invite experts from other countries to lecture in Delhi. Thus, circulation of expertise is not merely produced by a global core stabilized by localizing scientific practices, but local policy professionals, politicians, and non-governmental organizations also promote and advocate use of policy models implemented locally to other cities, inserting a city’s story into global conversations (McCann, 2008). Thus constructed, this knowledge is then used to construct a ‘moral geography’ where some cities are more livable than others depending on whether they have adopted those knowledges. McCann also notes that this is made possible by internationally mobile experts, that the ‘contemporary expert is not a state functionary but a knowledge worker operating...as a private consultant or as a specialist, or a new public manager in a quasi-autonomous state agency defining truths about, providing information on, and implementing techniques that facilitate governmental programs’ (McCann, 2008).

Thus, as Hajer says in The Politics of Environmental Discourse, (Hajer, 1997) , environmental discourses rely on negotiated ‘facts’ or points of agreement between different actors. Thus, dominating discourses of environment may emerge haphazardly through time and place-specific storylines in different societies and disseminated elsewhere as neutral science.

However, as we have seen these negotiated facts are also fore-grounded by genuine scientific uncertainty which uses vocabularies of ‘probabilities’ that could not be understood by the lay public. Does this incommensurability of vocabularies and translation of ‘jargon’ by N

It discusses the logics through which an imminent, disastrous future that is unpredictable and uncertain is made legible by various practices. The first is calculation through which such uncertainties are attempted to be mapped. This involves imposition of a uniform category across variables that may differ in space and time and a complex entity is deconstructed to sort more variables which are then ranked according to their importance. For example, loss of productivity that results from missing out on jobs or schools due to illness from air pollution is calculated alongside with measures of prognosis, i.e. loss of life years. Calculation practices would first sort out evidence using emissions inventories and source apportionment studies; it would then inscribe them through trends, graphs and models; these would be acted upon in simulations and trend analysis to predict the future.

Second practice is ‘imagination’ which involves some creativity on behalf of experts as they imagine futures as if they were present and real. The aim is to create ‘affective representations of calculations that mobilize’. In our story, personal experiences of experts in various airs around the world, experience of Delhi’s past air discourse itself, along with indices like AQI and objects like posters, images and maps allow us to project a future to act upon.

Third, acts of calculation and imagination have to be embodied to make them materially present. This is done through public discussions and conferences, marches to ‘save Delhi’s air’, demonstrations of clean technologies, signing pledges and campaigns by hand or virtually. Together, these three acts of calculating, imagining and performing futures gives structure to and stabilizes an otherwise uncertain environmental knowledge.

7. Further Questions

Though questions for further examination have been discussed in various sections, here I focus on questions that deviate from these frameworks and could be used to understand Delhi’s air in interesting ways. Since this analysis focuses on a largely ‘top-down’ understanding of expertise and knowledge practices, it would be illuminating to study ‘counter-expertise’, i.e. those knowledges which are not explicitly formulated and entextualized. This is important as a lot of these experts claim that people of Delhi are ‘immune’ to air pollution and don’t wear masks. What is the understanding of air by this ‘other’? Or, what are the everyday perceptions of air in Delhi?

Second question relates to understanding the spatial distribution of air (as has been done for land, water, food and other consumer products). Clearly, not everyone breathes the same air in Delhi. How can this differential access be studied and what does it imply about urban environments? Both these questions arise from Lawhon’s calls for a ‘situated urban political ecology’ where cities are studied through another epistemological domain-of knowing the city through every day practices (Lawhon et al., 2014)

A Second set of questions emerge from this study itself, including: what insights can be gained by focusing on a few actors or a particular technology, for example, AQI? What can that tell us about production of knowledge and expertise in urban environments?

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