Do you ever feel that, as a middle-class Indian, you have lost control of your life? That now, more than ever, you are at the mercy of circumstances completely beyond your control? And that, though you are paying more taxes than ever before, you are getting less and less from the government? Even your health and safety are at risk.
It’s certainly beginning to feel that way for me. Rarely have I felt more like a cork helplessly bobbing along in a flood of dirty water with no direction home.
It starts with the air. I travel a fair amount, and there was a time when I would long to return to Delhi. Especially in the winter, I would long for Delhi’s blooming flowers, tree-lined roads, and that slight cold nip in the air.
No longer.
I know I am back in Delhi the moment my eyes start burning and my throat feels like it is being sandpapered. My wife, who has asthma, struggles to breathe and sleep at night.
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‘There is no solution’
We know what the problem is. I have lived in Delhi for over three decades now, and I have watched horrified as more and more poison has been released into the air. Delhi is now the world’s most polluted city, and the smog blanket is a health hazard.
The city’s ever-increasing levels of pollution are due to many things—geographical location and wind factors, for instance. But there is a myth we have been fed: there is no solution. Everything has been tried and nothing seems to work, goes the narrative.
It suits politicians to feed us this lie, but the truth is that nearly every other city in our situation has actually found solutions. The best example is China, where the air in the cities was as bad as ours—until the government began cleaning it up.
Nor are these solutions hard to find. A couple of weeks ago, Amitabh Dubey offered some ways out in his column for ThePrint. Others have also offered sensible suggestions. But none of these will ever be implemented, even though the BJP now runs the central and state governments as well as the municipalities.
There is no political will to fight pollution. Instead, there is a desire to undermine the measures that already exist. GRAP quickly turns into CRAP, air pollution figures are fudged, and citizens are told that, because there is no solution, we must just live with toxic levels of pollution.
Some of this comes down to stupidity: AQI levels in Delhi are three or four times the IQ levels of the Delhi cabinet members. But venality is also involved. Pollution control measures will hurt contractors, builders, transporters, and people who run polluting industrial units. It is far easier for politicians to tell us that nothing can be done while keeping the gravy train running.
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IndiGo crisis
You could, of course, try to escape Delhi. But that brings its own problems. For several days now, IndiGo, India’s largest airline, has been paralysed. It’s hard to get a flight out of Delhi.
The government will have told you how evil IndiGo is and how irresponsibly it has behaved. But it’s a little more complicated than that. The basic problem is that when the flight duty norms for pilots changed, it became clear that all airlines would have to hire more pilots to fly the same number of planes.
Most airlines duly hired new pilots. But IndiGo did not. This could hardly have passed unnoticed. When the country’s largest airline (IndiGo is bigger than all the others put together) is not hiring enough pilots, people talk and wonder what’s going on.
The regulators at the Ministry of Civil Aviation (MoCA) must have noticed. But they did nothing. So when the duty norms changed, IndiGo found that it did not have enough pilots, and chaos ensued.
The ministry is now trying to recover its besmirched image by calling IndiGo names. But, of course, it won’t do the one thing that would help the affected passengers: ask IndiGo to pay compensation to all those whose flights were suddenly cancelled. Besides, not one of the regulators who allowed this to happen has been sacked.
The IndiGo crisis, where regulators looked the other way, is symbolic of the Indian way. For over a decade now, almost everyone I know who follows the situation in Goa has been warning that corruption has reached such levels that you can do anything illegal if you pay off the right people. No regulation is ever honestly enforced, and the tourist season is an accident waiting to happen.
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Was it always like this?
Last week, a fire at a sleazy nightclub killed over 20 people. Fire regulations had not been followed, and there were not enough routes for those caught in the blaze to escape.
There is some talk of extraditing the owners of the nightclub from Thailand, where they fled. But no government official has been arrested. They will live to be bribed another day.
When each day brings more and more news of this nature, I sometimes wonder: was it always like this? Was our system so lax that politicians could sit back and watch citizens being poisoned, stranded, or burned alive? And did they always get away with it?
Perhaps I am romanticising the past, but my sense is that things have never been as bad as they are today. We have always been at the mercy of corrupt politicians, but they have never been as brazen as they are now. The issue is not one of party politics. In 2014, we voted out the UPA. But every single instance quoted above is the responsibility of the NDA.
Mostly, it is our fault. We are now a society that debates the national song for 10 hours in Parliament rather than the real issues facing India.
Why do the politicians do this? Because we let them. We will moan. We will groan. But when we go to the polling booths, none of this will matter.
And we will get the governments we deserve.
Vir Sanghvi is a print and television journalist and talk show host. He tweets @virsanghvi. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)