Airy-fairy policies

Thinking of the government's newly cleared Auto-Fuel policy, the image of Nero fiddling while Rome was burning, sticks in my head.

The policy is supposed to set the road map for technology and policy for meeting clean air targets in Indian cities -- in other words, the policy mix needed for securing mobility and public health.

Instead, it reflects the worst ostrich mindset of government scientists, planners and, in particular, of Indian industry captains and cheerleaders.

It digs its head in the mud and pretends that the problem of air pollution does not exist and even if it does, a little bit of fiddling and tinkering will make it go away.

Its authors call their technology roadmap 'pragmatic.'

What this means is that most cities, already spluttering in their vehicles spit, will get no relief till 2005, when the fuel and technology already available to the big cities will be made available to their hapless people.

This, Euro-II technology, which will be made available in cities like Guwahati or Sholapur in 2005, was made mandatory, because of Supreme Court orders in Delhi in 2000.

The 11 'more' polluted cities, identified by the government policy, for special treatment, will get nothing substantially new till 2010 -- eight years from now, when Euro-IV compliant technology would be mandated.

These cities, instead will take hesitant steps, moving from Euro II compliant of yesterday to an incrementally better Euro III technology in 2005.

It is well understood in pollution circuits that there is really not much difference in these two generations, which move only marginally towards the future.

The real technology jump comes with the Euro IV compliant, which will be introduced in Europe in 2004 and, according to the Indian government, in a few of our dirty cities in 2010. Indians don't deserve clean air is the verdict.

This is when, most automobile companies are already capable of manufacturing Euro III compliant vehicles and are busy selling these 'cleaner' cars in Europe, where people clearly deserve better.

When the Supreme Court advanced the deadline for automobile technology by almost five years, vehicle and fuel manufacturers scrambled and met the new standards.

Therefore, why should policy efforts remain so miserly and small-minded? Why should policy not push the pace of technology?

The fact is that we have a colossal problem of large and dirty vehicles on our roads, which are poisoning air and destroying human lives.

But the problem is not so colossal that we cannot think of alternatives. We have the advantage of being the latecomers in this auto-fuel race. We can afford to configure a new pathway, so that the dream of mobility does not become the nightmare of our cities.

This is when we know that the western world is cleaning up its vehicles -- each new generation is becoming a little better than the earlier fleet.

But we also know that even as it becomes cleaner, a new pollution challenge confronts its technologists. Therefore, at the end, modern and sophisticated technology is always a step behind the problem it is creating. Chasing the problem, you can say.

In the past 15 years or so, the issue of particulates -- fine air toxins that penetrate our lungs and blood circulatory systems -- has taken centre-stage in pollution management.

Challenged by this emerging science, vehicle and fuel technology has innovated and it is widely accepted that the 2004-vehicle generation in the western world would have licked this particular problem.

But now scientists are discovering that as the emission-fuel technologies reduce the mass of particles, the size of the particles reduces and the number of particles emitted by vehicles goes up and not down.

Except that this time, the particles are even smaller in size, nanoparticles, measured in the scale of a nanometre -- a billionth of a metre. These particles, difficult, even to measure, say scientists could be even more deadly as they can penetrate through the human skin.

Therefore, the Indian Auto-Fuel policy should have underlined that the way of the future is to reinvent the transportation mindset to suit the needs of the newly industrialising countries.

It should have stressed that we don't have to make the mistakes of the western world. We don't have to build cities on the imperative of private transport.

We don't have to build pollution-control on the basis of fitting after-treatment devices of our cars and cleaning up our fuel. We will determine new ways to the future city -- combining the convenience of mobility, economic growth with public health imperatives.

Therefore, even as the whole world looks for little solutions in the problems of pollution and congestion, we will reinvent the answer. We will invent the 'idea' of mobility itself. But would that be expecting too much from the fossilised government minds?

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