Monday, Oct. 02, 2006

Running Out of Breath

By Aravind Adiga

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.

What ails Kanpur ails cities like it throughout India. In 2004, a list of the 10 Indian cities with the highest levels of the air pollutant PM 10?particulate material with a diameter of less than 10 microns?did not include a single metropolis. All 10 were secondary urban centers like Kanpur (which came in fourth after Raipur, Jharia, and Jalandhar). India's biggest cities?New Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta and Madras?are hardly havens of clean air and healthy living. But, to varying degrees, they seem to be waking up at last to the importance of curbing pollution. New Delhi, for example, has forced all of its auto-rickshaws and buses to switch from diesel to less-polluting compressed natural gas (CNG), which has led to an impressive drop in the levels of pollutants like carbon monoxide.

Away from these four megacities, and with nothing like the same level of media or political attention, lie the second-tier cities like Kanpur, where the environmental challenges are exacerbated by rapid population growth. Between 1991 and 2001, Kanpur's population rose by 32.5%, much faster than the national average of 21.3%. The city, already overcrowded, is adding another half a million people every five years at its current rate. Kanpur is the largest city in the state of Uttar Pradesh, which was home to 166 million people in 2001, making it larger than most nations; by 2026 it's projected to have 250 million people. Uttar Pradesh, which has the nation's highest birthrate, is one of a handful of expanding northern states that are set to propel India's population to 1.45 billion people around 2030, when it will overtake China as the world's biggest country, according to the United Nations. That would mean 400 million new Indians?22% of them in Uttar Pradesh alone?in the first 30 years of this century. On the positive side, some analysts predict that India will reap a "demographic dividend" as millions more young Indians join the workforce. On the negative side, this additional population will add tremendously to the pressure on India's environment. Since giant metropolises like Bombay and Calcutta are nearing saturation, the second-tier cities will have to absorb much of this new population.

That's why, in so many ways, the real ticking bomb for India's environment is in places like Kanpur. Pollution in the smaller cities "is already horrific, but it's only going to get worse," says R.K. Pachauri, director general of the Energy and Resources Institute, an environmental think tank in New Delhi. "The local authorities are deplorable, and the problem is not getting highlighted at the national level. At some point, we'll be shocked into dealing with this pollution, and then the cost of cleaning up these cities will be much greater."

Outside the registration office of a government-run chest hospital in Kanpur, men sit with masks made from white handkerchiefs, while women pull their saris over their faces; they're trying to make sure that their germs don't spread to others. About 200 or 300 people a day come to this hospital with respiratory ailments. S.K. Katiyar, principal of Kanpur's GSVM Medical College, explains how the air pollution contributes, directly or indirectly, to a range of pulmonary-tract diseases in Kanpur. Some, like COPD, are directly linked to the pollution. Others, like tuberculosis?a disease that strikes many poor residents of Kanpur?are not caused by pollution, but may find it easier to attack people already weakened by pollution.

As he's talking, Katiyar suddenly slips into the darkness. The lights have gone out in the hospital. A moment later, they come back on, accompanied by a buzzing noise. The hospital's generators have kicked in. It's a familiar sound throughout the city. At night, Meston Road, a busy commercial street, is cacophonous with the rattling of large, diesel-powered generators that are turned on when Kanpur's lights go out, which happens almost daily; power cuts can last from half an hour to half a day. Maqbool Hassan, an optician, keeps a diesel generator outside his shop. "We're all contributing to the pollution," he says, speaking loudly so he can be heard above the din of the machine. "But what choice do we have?"

Kanpur's power supply isn't the only part of the city's decaying, overburdened infrastructure that's failing. If anything, the city's water system is worse. Sitting cross-legged on a straw mat, the qazi of Kanpur, Manzoor Ahmad, who is the chief cleric of the city's large Muslim population, says: "The other day, a woman living just next door to this room bottled the water from her tap and sent it to the mayor. 'See if you can drink this,' she told the mayor. There was no response." Indeed, Kanpur's water is even more famously polluted than its air. By the 1980s, the discharge from tanneries and other industries had made the Ganges stinking and discolored, despite its importance as a holy river. Twenty years ago, the government of India launched an ambitious scheme to clean up the Ganges; Kanpur's tanneries were required to treat their effluent before dumping it into the river. Twenty years on, the river is still horribly polluted at Kanpur: the water smells, and locals who drink from the river often fall ill. The river water is treated before it gets to the taps of Kanpur's residents, yet an antiquated system of piping ensures that sewage and clean water flow side by side, separated sometimes only by inches. The inevitable often happens: the qazi reports that he recently heard of a case of sewage flowing out of a tap instead of water. He pauses, then says: "Sometimes, this city gets so dirty that it's not fit for humans to live in."

But once upon a time, it was. The Kotwali is Kanpur's most famous landmark. A British-era police office, it is a striking building, capped off by a tower with four clocks. The yellow paint is peeling, revealing the brick structure underneath, as if the building were afflicted with a painful dermatological condition; none of its four clocks are working, laundry is put out to dry on its balconies, and posters of politicians and stains of red betel juice disfigure its scabrous walls. The Kotwali is now a metaphor for a city that seems to have been skinned of civic decency: a place where piles of garbage sit on roadsides, where rubble from construction sites is simply tossed onto the roads, where residents fling their waste onto the pavements, unconcerned about one another. For the qazi, the rot in the city's administration goes all the way from the bottom?from municipal sweepers who sometimes refuse to do their work well unless they are bribed?to the top: "Look at where the mayor and the big officials of this city live?even those areas are so filthy." Yet the qazi, and optician Maqbool Hassan, like many older inhabitants, remember a time, 35 or 40 years ago, when the streets were swept twice a day and Kanpur was cleaner. Most old-timers trace Kanpur's civic collapse to a larger malaise: the rotting away of the political culture of Uttar Pradesh, which has acquired, over decades, a reputation for being one of India's most misgoverned states. Start a conversation with someone in Kanpur about pollution, of the literal kind, and it will eventually end up as a discussion about the abstract kinds of pollution eating away at the state: corruption, poor law and order, and tensions between various castes and classes. "Until we get politicians who are truly accountable to the people," says Hassan, "we won't see a cleanup in this city."

At night, Kanpur teems with activity. it is well past 10 p.m., but shopkeepers are still squatting in their stalls in the city's alleys, selling fried sweets, small pieces of gold jewelry, copper pots and Harry Potter T shirts. Then the morning comes, and it's time to clean up the garbage.

In Baconganj, a congested, mostly Muslim neighborhood, charcoal smoke blows from grimy restaurants into houses; a slick of sewage shines around doorsteps; children play hide-and-seek in piles of trash. "We've got every disease here, because of the filth," complains one resident, a tailor. "Sometimes men just go crazy from living in places like this." There is a rattling noise behind him and he steps aside; two boys come pushing a wheelbarrow brimming with iridescent black muck, which they have scooped out of a gutter; they will take it out of the alley and dump it on the main road. If the residents of that road are lucky, it may get collected from there and dumped somewhere else. If those residents are lucky, it will get picked up by a city truck and driven 15 km away to be dumped beside a busy road, at a place where miles of open country are polluted with Kanpur's refuse. Cows graze through the garbage there, red-eyed mynas hop about, and a family of scavengers looks for polythene bags. "This has been a good year for us," says the paterfamilias. "There have been very few cases of diarrhea, compared to last year." Done collecting, he ties the polythene bags together and drops them on a giant scale to weigh them; merchants come all the way from New Delhi and Benares to buy the bags, which he sells at nine cents per kilogram.

Despite the problems, there is some hope for Kanpur. The authorities have a plan, for instance, to shift all of the city's tempos from diesel to CNG engines; the switch is happening very slowly, but once completed, it should improve the quality of air. Perhaps one day, the state and city officials, whose faces beam down on Kanpur's residents from hoardings throughout the city, will see the benefits of such an initiative and be inspired to confront pollution with a greater sense of urgency. But for now, the locals, who are nothing if not enterprising, have come up with their own ways to survive the pollution.

Enter Jajmau, the suburb that is home to Kanpur's 350 tanneries, and the foul air assaults you almost at once. Behind the tanneries lies the slum of Monanagar, where perhaps a hundred people live in a few concrete sheds near the banks of the Ganges. This is the most polluted part of the most polluted suburb of Kanpur. The air is unbearably bad?perhaps the worst in the entire city.

Faced with pollution like this?pollution that is so overwhelming, so omnipresent?maybe the only escape is to cling to a kind of mystical faith that, at a certain point, the stench is powerful enough to become purifying. A few feet away from the colony is a series of black pots, bubbling with a black liquid and emitting smoke. Mohammad Anees, who is perhaps 25 years old, or 26, or 27?he doesn't really know?is watching over one of the pots. Anees explains that the tanneries send their putrid waste?piles of shredded leather?to this slum. He and the other slum dwellers boil the leather in the black pots, extract the animal fat that remains in the skins, and sell the fat to soapmakers. "If we don't take this stuff from the tanneries, it will cause diarrhea and diseases among the workers there," he says. Isn't he concerned that the waste will make him sick instead? Anees, who wears a talismanic amulet around his neck to ward off disease, as many poor in Kanpur do, shakes his head. "The smoke from this pot is what saves me," he says. The others in the slum agree. They too seem to believe, as Anees does, that all of them would have contracted tuberculosis amid this squalor, but for the magic fumes from these black pots. Sensing skepticism on the face of a stranger, Anees steps aside from his smoking black pot and gestures with his hand: "Try it for yourself."