In India, Can the World’s Cleanest Fuel Clear the Air?
Automakers have kept up with rigorous standards, but only for global markets. Maruti-Suzuki, for example, exports to Japan and Europe the made-in-India Baleno hatchback, which adheres to the highest emission standards in those markets. So the industry is familiar with BS-VI technology. The challenge appears to be one of scale, ramping up capacities and aligning suppliers to manufacture BS-VI compliant vehicles for the vast domestic market.
SIAM says the auto industry must invest more than $15 billion to meet the new regulatory standards, in particular to adapt Euro-VI technology to Indian driving conditions. That’s an expensive undertaking, particularly for an industry that in 2017 had to liquidate stocks worth $3.1 billion, based on an earlier Supreme Court directive. Similar to how it accelerated India’s transition to BS-VI technology now, India’s apex court in 2017 pushed for BS-IV compliant vehicles by ordering the auto industry to stop selling BS-III vehicles.
The World’s Most Environment-Friendly Judiciary?
Time and again, the Indian Supreme Court has issued orders that have burnished its credentials as the environmental steward of India. Where successive Indian governments have faltered, the judiciary has stepped in. “What the Indian courts are doing fits their context. The judiciary’s role is needed and appropriate in India,” believes ELI’s Pendergrass. There is a strong constitutional basis in India for judicial activism on the environment. The right to life is fundamental, per Article 21 of the Indian Constitution, and Indian courts view a clean environment and public health as integral to Indians’ right to life. Pendergrass contrasts that with the U.S., where successful environmental legislation relies on the Commerce Clause in the American Constitution.
These identical perspectives show the visual difference in Delhi’s air quality from one year to the next. In the top photo, traffic passes the India Gate landmark in October 2016. The bottom photo is the same view from October 2017, with smog so thick the monument is barely visible. (Top: AP Photo/Altaf Qadri; Bottom: AP Photo/Tsering Topgyal)
In India, judicial activism on environmental issues is not just the domain of the Supreme Court. In 2010, India established dedicated green courts in the form of the National Green Tribunal (NGT) to rapidly resolve environmental cases — a move that acknowledges both its raging environmental conflicts and the slow-moving judicial system. The tribunal’s first leader, Justice Swatanter Kumar, acquired a formidable reputation for being a defender of the environment.
But environmentalists worry about the future of India’s green courts. Since 2014, the NGT has been a thorn in the side of the big business-friendly, right-wing government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Environment ministers in the Modi administration have complained about the “extreme” and “overreactive” positions of the NGT. And leading environmental lawyers accuse the government of hollowing out the NGT, leaving it unstaffed and making its appointees subservient to the ministry of environment.
The long-term effectiveness of the Indian judiciary in upholding environmental rights remains in question. Judges typically don’t have the technical knowledge to decide on complex, multi-dimensional, scientific, health and environmental issues facing Indian communities. Moreover, courts can order, but only governments can enforce. “In India, there is so much reliance on public interest litigation, but very little happens by way of enforcement,” says Pendergrass.
Similar concerns surround the federal government’s new National Clean Air Programme, which puts the lion’s share of enforcement responsibility on individual state governments. Air pollution in north India is a regional issue that requires close federal-state coordination among different political parties. In India’s current fractious domestic political environment, to assume that level of cooperation is laughable.
When it comes to enforcement, the Supreme Court also has been known to step in. Certainly, that’s true of the court’s approach to air pollution — so much so that almost two decades ago, with the court’s help, Delhi came close to fixing its pollution problem.
How Did Delhi Get Here? A Blast (of Clean Air) from the Past
To know what lies ahead for India, it’s important to examine how emission standards have evolved in the country.
In 1998, public interest litigations demanded cleaner air in Delhi. In response, the Supreme Court ordered the establishment of the Environment Pollution (Prevention and Control) Authority (EPCA), which continues to serve as a fact-finding body for the court. Back then, the EPCA worked with the Delhi government to recommend that the capital shift its entire bus fleet to Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) fuel, a cleaner-burning fuel compared to petrol and diesel. With that, the unthinkable happened; Delhi began running the world’s cleanest public bus system in the early 2000s.
Various independent and Indian government studies have established that converting commercial vehicles to CNG significantly improved Delhi’s air quality, which in turn, measurably reduced the risk of illnesses and premature deaths. Today, CNG is available in more than 50 Indian cities.
If EPCA recommended the CNG plan for Delhi, it was the Supreme Court that mandated the plan. In India, as in many places around the world, best-laid plans can falter as governments retreat and bureaucracies delay. Delhi managed to avoid such backtracking because the court set deadlines for first buses, and then for taxis and three-wheeled auto-rickshaws to switch to CNG. In addition, the court directed state-owned oil companies to establish more fueling stations to ensure an uninterrupted supply of the fuel.
Delhi’s choked citizens scored a key victory. But these gains from public transit switching to CNG were subsequently negated as privately owned diesel cars flooded Indian roads.
Many hold the automobile industry responsible. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the Indian car market took off. Car companies were eager to sell low-cost diesel vehicles to first-time car buyers and as private taxis. “We wanted buses to move to the cleaner CNG. We certainly did not want cars to use the dirty, toxic diesel!” writes leading Indian environmentalist Sunita Narain in her book, “Conflicts of Interest.”
The automobile industry, represented by ace lawyers — including none other than India’s present finance minister, Arun Jaitley, and past finance minister, P Chidambaram — succeeded in preventing a ban on diesel cars.
This literal dark cloud that hovered over India had a silver lining. “The Supreme Court, faced with this barrage of opposition from the industry… decided that instead of banning diesel in private cars, it would push for drastic improvement in fuel and emission standards,” writes Narain. And thus, in April 1999, the first-ever standards for emission-control technology and fuel were introduced in India, by the order of the Supreme Court.
Getting Industry on Board
More than any other contemporary milestone, BS-VI fuel represents a paradigm shift for India. The technology will not only help to clean India’s air, but it will also force modernization of the car market in important ways. Finally, the days of the dirty diesel car may be numbered in India. Euro-VI compliant diesel cars are more complicated and more costly to manufacture. Analysts expect diesel cars to become more expensive and fall out of favor with the Indian consumer. Further, India’s leap to BS-VI fuel means that something has to be done about its legacy fleet. It’s nearly impossible to envision the logistics of eliminating from India’s roads the vast number of privately owned, low-cost and emissions-belching diesel vehicles. But the government has proposed India’s first-ever scrap policy for commercial vehicles, a welcome step in a country where the ultimate fate of used cars remains unknown.
Even the reluctant auto industry knows that putting in place a modern eco-system of car production in India’s relatively low-cost labor environment would eventually make it more competitive in the global market. The country’s oil industry has been quicker to embrace change. “There has been a strategic push for refining capacity expansion from the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas of India. With BS-VI, in the next two years there will many technological advances from which India will benefit for years,” believes PwC’s Bera.
After the rice harvest, farmers in Punjab burn the remaining vegetation to quickly clear the fields so they can plant the next crop. Burning of crops in surrounding rural areas is a significant source of particulate matter air pollution for north Indian cities. (Photo by Neil Palmer/CIAT)
Indeed, India’s state-owned as well as private refiners are pursuing ambitious expansion plans, which reflect geopolitical concerns about energy security and economic concerns about crude-oil price volatility. Despite importing more than 80 percent of the oil it consumes, India is a net exporter of refined petroleum product. The shift to Euro VI-grade fuel, estimated to cost India’s oil industry US$4.5 billion, could help secure fuel supplies at home as well as boost exports to developed countries.
When Will the Air Clear?
These benefits are real, but not immediately obvious to the average citizen. Indians, ever cynical about their country’s environmental degradation, won’t breathe noticeably cleaner air until BS-VI compliant cars have hit the fast lane in India, after two or more years.
Frustratingly, some factors responsible for north India’s air quality are beyond human control. Geography is one of them. Winds from throughout India and neighboring countries converge and stagnate in the landlocked Indo-Gangetic plains (encompassing northern India, eastern Pakistan and all of Bangladesh), situated on the foothills of the gigantic Himalayas. North India’s cooler winter air makes this bad situation worse by trapping pollutants and creating a choking blanket of smog. Last winter, PM2.5 levels in Delhi soared as high as 500 µg/m³ on certain days. In contrast, the bustling cities of southern coastal India, including Mumbai, Chennai and Bangalore, benefit from sea breezes that can flush out polluted city air.
In this topographic punchbowl, some additional, uniquely South Asian sources compound the air pollution, from villagers burning wood and cow dung for cooking to farmers burning crop to clear out pests and create fertilizing ash. In theory, substitute technologies such as seeders in farms are available and can make a huge difference. In practice, distressed, debt-ridden Indian farmers who themselves suffer the ill effects of smoke remain shackled in obsolete practices.
Taken together, population pressures, economic growth, inept politicians and geographical reality mean that in the foreseeable future, Indians cannot take their fundamental right to live in a clean, healthy environment for granted. In this long struggle, public interest litigation and judicial activism will continue to give Indians a fighting chance.
India’s leap to Euro VI standards is a stride in the right direction. Those on the front lines know that electric and autonomous cars represent new opportunities. “We don’t believe in replacing all Euro-VI compliant vehicles with electric vehicles,” says CSE’s Mukerjee. “We are looking at the future through the lens of shared mobility.”
Shared mobility for 1 billion-plus Indians? Now that will be another story.
Originally published at nextcity.org.
