The Colonial Roots of India's Air Pollution Crisis

Government inaction, implementation failure, delayed or missed deadlines, and piecemeal restrictions on single emission sources have hence characterised the collective response to the atmospheric crisis in Delhi and metropolitan India more generally.1 A political blame game has ensued, with charges...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Economic and political weekly 2019-11
Main Author: D Asher Ghertner
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Air pollution
College faculty
Colonialism
Epistemology
Genealogy
Illnesses
Lungs
Metabolism
Petitions
Pollution
Pollution control
Segregation
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Summary:Government inaction, implementation failure, delayed or missed deadlines, and piecemeal restrictions on single emission sources have hence characterised the collective response to the atmospheric crisis in Delhi and metropolitan India more generally.1 A political blame game has ensued, with charges levelled across party lines that the various agencies with the capacity to act at the city, state, and national levels have neither coordinated to develop an adequate pollution-remediation strategy, nor taken the issue as the life-or-death matter the medical profession considers it to be (Safi 2017). Tracing resonances between early 20th-century medical renderings of the Indian lung and present-day discourses of unique "Indian conditions," it is shown how neo-Lamarckian logic of racial inheritance underpins state discourse about atmospheric composition and health, impairing the capacity to produce clean air. [...]this colonial framing is undone, airpocalypse will remain just another confirmation of the Indo-Gangetic plains' tropical otherness. The University of Chicago's Air Quality Life Index (Greenstone and Qing Fan 2018: 4), using less conservative assumptions, estimated that the people of Delhi on an average lose more than 10 years of life due to bad air, and the World Health Organization (WHO 2018) declared "air pollution the most important single risk factor for premature disability and death in India. [...]the colonial epistemology of tropical otherness is broken down, we can, unfortunately, expect technologies of sequestration to go on superseding structural efforts to produce air otherwise.
ISSN:0012-9976