“There is an old story about a worker suspected of stealing: every evening, as he leaves the factory, the wheelbarrow he rolls in front of him is carefully inspected. The guards can find nothing. It is always empty. Finally, the penny drops: what the worker is stealing are the wheelbarrows themselves …” – Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections
“There is no unhappier creature under the sun than a fetishist who longs for a woman’s shoe but has to make do with the whole woman.” – Karl Krauss
“The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.” – Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1
“All that is solid melts into air” – Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
“When you provide information.. Individuals will take note and take action. They’ll either bring in the air purifiers inside the house and inside their offices, or they will move to a locality where the air is cleaner…. People will make choices which part of the city should I live in to breathe cleaner air” He continues “what happens to the large mass of people like these construction laborers who have no option but to be outdoors most part of the day which is why the onus is on all of us in this room to find Solutions which can help the large mass of Indian population and not limited to the urban Elites only and that’s the challenge I’m giving all of us to take”
He then gives a framework of solving the problem of air pollution.
Information —-> Awareness ——-> Prevention or Mitigation (41:38)
Of course, he is much interested in the mitigation aspect.
He asked a consulting group from IITK to make a report on the best ‘mitigation’ practices from across the world in Agriculture, Healthcare, Insurance, Travel and Infrastructure.
- Agriculture – Pollution-resistant seeds – opening up of new markets for GMOs.
- Infrastructure – identify buildings, monuments, which are likely to be most affected by air pollution – prioritization of maintenance
- Healthcare – personalized air quality thresholds. Different people have different thresholds. Customized health plans.
- Tourism – Identify good air locations, promote it from an eco-tourism lens.
He sees geospatial techniques (drone, high-resolution maps) as something to be used in the mitigation part of solving air pollution, which basically means opening up new markets in different sectors.
The quantification of air was supposed to spread awareness among people so they could do something about it. Instead, what the data does is to make them retreat into their personal spheres and forget about political action, holding the government accountable, and so on.
Alenka Zupancic, in her recent book Disavowal, shows how in the face of the traumatic confrontation with climate change, people engage in what she calls “fetishistic disavowal,” i.e., “Yes, I know that the problem is serious, but still all remains the same”. I would like to build on her argument and say that when Indians are confronted with the AQI numbers, they do not take any action, but rather launch themselves into buying air purifiers (as the Geospatial head talked about). The knowledge was supposed to spread awareness and politicize the air, but rather it opened up new markets. Such quantification is called ‘commensuration’. This is not the first time such a thing has happened with a commons. The same thing happened with water, where TDS became the metric that opened up the market for water purifiers. The state no longer guaranteed clean water, but posed the problem of water as a choice for the individual. It was up to citizen (now a consumer) if she wanted to have clean water.
The problem of air pollution hinges on metrics like AQI and particles like PM2.5. However, I would contest that this is a fetishized way of thinking about the problem of air pollution. Without asking deeper questions (socio-economic conditions, history, market forces, inequality, politics), ie, dealing with the whole woman, dealing with the shoes (indexes, metrics, data) is a fetishized way of framing the problem. The media’s attention is drawn towards how these stations are being manipulated, or how water sprinklers are being used near these stations, or how they are being turned off during peak hours. This diverts our attention from the real problem.
“A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys, and they both look under the streetlight together. After a few minutes, the policeman asks if he is sure he lost them here, and the drunk replies, No, and that he lost them in the park. The policeman asks why he is searching here, and the drunk replies- This is where the light is!”
lackingsubject 