Things have never been as bad as they are today

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 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 that I breathe. I travel a fair amount and there was a time when I would long to return to Delhi, especially in the winter to enjoy the blooming flowers, the tree lined roads and that slight cold nip in the air.

 

   No longer.

 

   I know I am back in Delhi because the moment I land, my eyes start burning and my throat feels like it is being sandpapered. My wife, who has asthma, struggles to breathe and to be able to sleep at night.

 

   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 to the extent that Delhi is now the world’s most polluted city and the atmosphere is a health hazard.

 

   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 failed.

 

   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 till 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 The Print. 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 and 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.

 

"Was our system so lax that politicians could sit back and watch citizens being poisoned, stranded or burnt alive?"

   Some of this is down to stupidity: AQI levels in Delhi are three to four times the IQ levels of members of the Delhi cabinet. But venality is also involved: pollution control measures will hurt contractors, builders, transporters, people who run polluting industrial units etc. So it’s far easier for politicians to tell us that nothing can be done while keeping the gravy train running.

 

   You could, of course, try and escape from Delhi. But that brings its own problems. For several days now Indigo, India’s largest airline, has been paralysed so 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 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 other airlines put together) is not hiring enough pilots, people talk and wonder what’s going on.

 

   The regulators at the Civil Aviation Ministry must have noticed. But they did nothing. So when the duty norms changed, Indigo found that it did not have enough pilots and chaos resulted.

 

  The Civil Aviation 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. And 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 that you want to do if you pay off the right people. No regulation is ever honestly enforced and the tourist season is an accident waiting to happen.

 

   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 fire to escape.

 

   There is some talk of extraditing the owners of the night club 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 burnt 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 today. The issue is not one of party politics. In 2014 after the scams, we voted out the UPA. But every single instance quoted above is the responsibility of the NDA.

 

   Mostly it is our fault. We have become a society where a ten hour parliamentary debate about a song takes precedence over debates on the real issues facing India.

 

   Why do the politicians do this? Well, 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.