Concerned over the unprecedented situation triggered by the growing air pollution in Delhi, Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh on Saturday wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi underlining the need for evolving consensus on tackling the issue, rising above political affiliations and regional considerations.
The Chief Minister said: “No Indian, and definitely no person in Punjab, is oblivious to the misery of our brethren in the national capital, whatever many around the country might have been led to believe.”
Pointing out that his own children and grandchildren living in Delhi were sharing the plight of the lakhs of people as a result of the toxic air enveloping the city, he said the situation “has exposed the hollowness of our claims of being a progressive and developed nation”.
“How can a country be called developed when its capital city has been reduced to a gas chamber, not by any natural disaster but a series of man-made ones?” he asked.
‘Acts of omission’
Making it clear that he had no intent of brushing his hands off Punjab’s responsibility in this tragic state of affairs, the Chief Minister said, however, the entire country, including Delhi itself and the government at the Centre, had allowed “this state of affairs to emerge and sustain, with our various acts of commission and omission”.
Admitting that stubble fires, supported by the winds blowing in the wrong direction, were contributing to the pollution, the Chief Minister noted that data from several independent agencies had pointed out that large-scale industrial pollution, the traffic overload, the excessive construction activity taking place in Delhi were equally, if not more, to blame.
“The situation continues to aggravate while we all play ball over the people’s pain and grief,” the Chief Minister said, adding that crux of the problem was that “we have persistently and foolishly refused to rise above political considerations to launch a collective search for a permanent solution,” the CM said.
“The solutions each one of us, the so-called stakeholders, have been proffering from time to time are but knee-jerk interventions that translate into nothing more than a case of ‘too little, too late’ every time,” he wrote.
