Madam Hema Malini is still selling KENT purifiers. But this time it’s air purifiers. Two decades back, my parents were sold water purifiers showing TDS meters. Citizens became consumers. Water became a product. Markets opened. Rich bought, poor suffered. Ensuring clean water became a goal and an achievement for urban people.
Now it’s time for air. Instead of TDS, it’ll be PM2.5 sensors showing “look how bad air is”. Salesmen will come and show you, but before that Google AirView+ would have already shown you how bad the air is. Rather than this metric being something which could have ignited some political action, it makes us run towards buying air purifiers.
While policy analysts and media crib about station’s data being manipulated, the quantification of air has led to opening up of markets (was it inevitable?). Let us not forget that air is political and we need political actions at large scale to solve this problem. Retreating to our inverted spheres is not the solution.
lackingsubject 