BURNING ISSUE

A CJI Ramana-led bench reprimanded and nudged governments to work together to control this menace keeping in view that the right to a pollution-free environment is enshrined in the Constitution

- Sanjay Raman Sinha

AMIDST yet another smoggy day in Delhi, a three-judge bench headed by Chief Justice of India NV Ramana took a hard stand against pollution and pushed the governments in Delhi-NCR to evolve a mechanism to tackle the menace.

The no-nonsense approach of the bench was not lost to the stakeholders. Hitherto farmers were at the receiving end and branded as prime polluters and parali (stubble) burners. This time, it was different as the bench took up cudgels for them.

This was not new for those who know Chief Justice Ramana. He was known for his activism in his early days and getting involved with issues concerning farmers and industrial workers. He has often taken sticky problems upfront with a missionary zeal.

The same proactiveness was seen during this hearing. One school of thought is that the present pollution narrative is anti-farmer and pro-city dwellers. To borrow a Marxist maxim of Amita Baviskar, Professor of Environmental Studies and Sociology, Ashoka University, Sonepat, it’s a “bourgeois environmentalism” phenomenon. Here, the poor are conveniently seen as responsible for urban pollution and have to bear the unequal costs of ecology reconstruction.

In recent times, parali burning was hyped as a major cause of pollution in the Delhi-NCR region. The Court, however, didn’t buy the theory. Interestingly, during the hearing, the research data itself became an ammunition for judges to demolish the myth of pollution.

The fight for clean air in the Delhi-NCR region in the Court, at one time, became a data-crunching exercise with the centre claiming that farm fires in Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh contributed only 10% of the pollution.