In the News
December 7, 2018
On Constitution Day last week, President Ram Nath Kovind focused on an important yet poorly-attended-to area of social justice: air pollution.
“If a child suffers from asthma as a result of air pollution, I see it as a gap in justice,” he said. He is perhaps the first national leader to have publicly discussed pollution as a country-wide problem and linked its health impact to justice.
In fact, he may have elevated the idea of justice itself by acknowledging that environmental justice is a subset of social justice. In his conception, it includes “modern civic parameters – such as clean air; less polluted cities and towns, rivers and water bodies; sanitary and hygienic living conditions; and green and eco-friendly growth and development.”
His words also spotlighted the difference between a country’s pursuit of growth and of development.
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The Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago has devised a new metric called the ‘air quality life index’. It allows us to measure the systemic impact of air pollution in India relative to other countries. It has calculated that Indians lose 4.3 years of their lives on average simply because they live in India. Delhi’s residents lose a full 10 years because they live in Delhi.