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FOUL PLAY: Kids gather above Kanpur, recently ranked seventh in a global list of cities with the worst air pollution

Running Out of Breath
	If you want to grasp the enormity of the environmental challenges facing India, visit Kanpur—shockingly polluted, overcrowded, and with a population that's still rapidly expanding
	By Aravind Adiga

Posted Monday, October 2, 2006; 20:00 HKT
Standing in the center of Kanpur in an all-white uniform, Ram Karan Singh explains the two peculiar drawbacks and one peculiar advantage of being a traffic policeman in this city. The first drawback is that he gets a laundry allowance of about $1.50 per month to clean his uniform. Even though that's more than twice what regular policemen get, it's still not nearly enough to stay smart: just one morning in this city, and his shirt starts to turn gray. Second, by standing all day in Kanpur's traffic and inhaling the air—a blend of dust, industrial emissions and burned diesel—Singh is putting himself at high risk of contracting a range of respiratory illnesses including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), a condition that starts by making it uncomfortable for you to breathe, and eventually catches your throat in a steel grip so tight that you must lie on a hospital bed with a mask over your face, gasping for oxygen. Doctors in Kanpur say that traffic policemen are among the most at-risk groups for COPD; Singh has figured this out on his own. "The air of this city sucks 10 years out of a man's life," he says, as half a dozen other traffic officers gather around him, eager to weigh in on the issue of pollution. Won't they set off a chain of accidents by leaving their posts at the height of rush hour? No, because that's the peculiar advantage of being a traffic cop in Kanpur, Singh explains. The roads are so full of potholes and so choked with cycle-rickshaws, cars and scooters that the traffic can only crawl along, making it virtually impossible for vehicles to hit each other dangerously hard. "And mind you, this is the best area of town," Singh says, with a look of scorn.

Ask them about Kanpur, a city of 3 million people on the banks of the Ganges River, and most Indians will talk about an anachronism—a moribund industrial town that is well past its heyday. Once known as the Manchester of India, and famous for its leather tanneries and textile mills, Kanpur went into decline after the 1960s; many industries shut down or left the city, and those that remained—like the tanneries—acquired a bad reputation because they were so polluting. Few foreign tourists visit Kanpur, and the city gets little attention even within India, where most people would rather visit, invest and live in places like Bangalore or Gurgaon, which epitomize the shining new India of technology and rapid economic growth. But far from being a relic of the past, Kanpur, which is among India's most polluted cities, is a harbinger of the future.

No place offers a more vivid glimpse of that future than the heart of the city. Patrons of the Café Coffee Day on Mall Road can watch Hindi pop videos on a TV screen as they drink coffee—or they can simply look out the window at the dust on the road, which is a form of entertainment in itself. By 10 a.m., the air pollution in this area can get dense enough to create a continuous wave that moves side to side along Mall Road, rather like a sheet of rain during a thunderstorm. If you go outside, the pollution burns your eyes and coats the back of your teeth with a granular deposit that must be spat out. In 2004, India's Central Pollution Control Board found that concentrations of particulate matter in Kanpur's air—the residue of dust and diesel emissions—had reached "critical" levels, and a 2006 World Bank Report ranked it as the seventh-worst city in the world for air pollution.

Walk around this part of town and you have no doubt that, in Kanpur, breathing is hazardous to your health.

Mukesh Sharma, an environmental-management expert at the Kanpur campus of the Indian Institute of Technology, explains how the city's air got wrecked. Start with poor planning. Kanpur, Sharma says, is bisected close to its center by a number of interstate roads, ensuring that a constant stream of heavy vehicles with no reason to be there passes through the middle of the city, polluting the air and clogging traffic. As India's economic boom has trickled down to Kanpur, the number of motorbikes and cars has surged; yet the roads are too narrow and decrepit for this swarm of vehicles to gather any speed. "You are almost never cruising on Kanpur's roads, just accelerating or breaking," says Sharma. Slow-moving vehicles pollute more: an auto-rickshaw going 10 km an hour emits 57% more carbon monoxide than one going 25 km an hour. Since it takes so long to move around Kanpur—Sharma budgets an hour to drive just 15 km from his campus to the train station—people can't live in the suburbs, so they pack the center of town. That increases air pollution from the burning of charcoal and firewood. Kanpur has little or no public transportation, so many residents rely on tempos—giant three-wheeled vehicles that take up to a dozen people, belch out clouds of diesel exhaust and add to the congestion by stopping frequently to pick up or drop off passengers. Poor sanitation makes matters worse: mounds of dirt and dust—which environmentalists blame on a lack of adequate tree cover—accumulate near the roads, sneak into potholes, and are kicked up when the traffic, finally, moves. For good measure, small-scale manufacturers of industrial goods such as batteries operate near (and sometimes within) some of the city's residential areas, thereby adding to the pollution.

Continued...

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