Lockdown disturbed human life but helped nature to gain back is strength.
Subrahmanian K
Whenever we hear about environment degradation the very first thing that pops into our head is air pollution. In fact it’s a very basic right to breath effortlessly and now it has become a tedious task. Ours is a diverse country with 1.38Billion people but often we tend to raise our voice only when we are affected. According to The Hindu report, 15 Indian cities are among the top 20 polluting cities in the world. These cities alone accommodate more than 30Million people, which mean it could be the 46th most populated country in the world. On 24th March Indian Prime Minister Sri. Narendra Modi declared a nationwide lockdown to combat COVID-19. As a result people couldn’t go out of their home, soon offices and industries were closed. In fact environment degradation occurs when water, air, land or any another form of pollution possesses threat to flora and fauna in a region. It’s a reality that our environment is deteriorating. To understand the changes let us take the example of New Delhi into consideration. We have seen the recent pictures of New Delhi covered in smog due to the heavy pollution. In fact the situation was so bad that schools were temporarily shut and free masks were distributed to students in Delhi NCR region.
Delhi has the highest number of vehicles compared to any other Indian cities and is dominated by personal vehicles and a relatively high population. A 2016 study by IIT Kanpur had found that vehicular emissions contribute to around 9% of the PM10 load in Delhi and around 20% of the PM2. Delhi ranks the worst in terms of global toxics emissions, thermal capture emissions and energy consumption despite the fact that most of its parameter such as the average duration of journeys and the share of public transport is better than other megacities. It’s true that during the harvest time, most of the pollution occur from burning crops in other regions. But in Delhi the situation is so bad that people hardly see stars and a clear sky has become a rare event.
Once the pandemic seeped into the city, people sitting at homes noticed that they could finally see the clear sky. In fact netizens started posting it on social media and were followed by memes from similar situation in many other cities.
There are many random tweets and pictures which we cannot depend upon to analyse the situational changes. For that we have to compare the levels of pollution (click to read the real-time graphs of all major pollutants) in terms of P10, P2.5 and other pollutants.
From the data it is very clear that the capital city has improved its air quality tremendously in a short span of time. In fact this rate is quicker than what we anticipated. This gives us hope for a better tomorrow. If we plan better and implement renewable fuels and newer norms we can restore what we destroyed in coming years. This COVID-19 has made our lives shattered and livelihood destroyed yet taught us to observe nature and embrace it.
However things are not smooth like we want them to be. With daily cases rising and government pushing more resources into fighting COVID-19, the medical waste is getting accumulated. Though population of Delhi is less than that of many states, 10% of medical waste is produced in Delhi alone and that accounts to about 11 tonne. Earlier the average per bed per day waste was about 0.5 kg. In the recent days it has rose to a whooping value of 2.4 to 4.5 kg per bed per day. Delhi has got good facilities to dispose bio waste. And in the pre COVID days Delhi dealt with medical wastes in a systematic way. However reports suggest that now daily disposal has been affected. People are using more masks and other protective gears. This too add the solid waste and in the coming years we will able to witness drains clogging with these accessories and an increase in the amount of micro-plastics entering our body. Almost all megacities are facing shortage of fresh water and with people consuming more water than ever before the amount of pollution from water is bound to increase. However the reality is that we cannot control these issues directly. Scientific solutions for reducing water usage and recycling of water is the only remaining option.
In these days people would feel that environment has improved. To an extent some positive signs have been observed in the case of air pollution. However the reality is that the world is piling up with hazardous medical waste and other pollutions. In cities with no solutions for proper disposal of solid waste and water treatment, this lockdown would damage the environment more than ever making us wonder if the improvement of environment we saw these days were paradoxical.