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Paradise lost
“Islamabad is not the same — too much traffic, too much smoke, too much noise. Our little heaven has become just another big city stripped of the tranquillity it was once known for,” a dejected Samina Shah said, as she waited at a traffic light on a road in the capital.
An asthma patient, she wears a mask while driving her children to school in crawling traffic. “Traffic jams are my worst nightmare. I just can’t breathe,” she lamented.
Pakistan’s capital is bursting with vehicles, the traffic police announced recently following a survey. “As many as 143,886 vehicles enter Islamabad every day,” said senior superintendent of Islamabad Traffic Police, Sultan Azam Temuri.
A leafy city of over one million people, the volume of traffic in Islamabad has increased at an exponential 17 per cent annually over the last 10 years, the survey revealed. “No less than 85,000 vehicles pass through each major junction,” the police officer observed.
Clouds of smoke and dust hang permanently over the Margalla Hills that overlook Islamabad. Once, these low-lying hills provided a scenic backdrop to the city. “Now it is only after the rain that we get to see that the hills are in fact green,” said Mujtaba Hussain, an accountant who grew up in the city.
But Islamabad is considerably less polluted than Karachi and Lahore. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has described the air quality in these two cities as dangerous. According to a 2004 country brief on Pakistan’s environmental issues, prepared by the US energy information administration, air pollution in both cities is 20 times higher than the permissible WHO standards.
As a result, hospitals are recording a rising trend in cases of heart and lung disease. High levels of air pollution contribute to the increased incidence of respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, according to WHO.
On April 26, a court in Karachi ordered the authorities to take immediate measures to control air pollution within three months in collaboration with the Pakistan Environmental Protection Agency (Pak-EPA).
Statistics in the National Health Policy document in 2001 had set alarm bells ringing. Ischemic heart diseases accounted for 12 per cent of the adult deaths in Pakistan. The ministry of health, however, refused to share the latest findings of the health information management system, based on a survey conducted in 2005, saying that these will be made public soon.
However, a World Bank report (2001, updated in 2004) gives an idea of the incidence of diseases that are directly associated with air pollution. It says that people in Pakistan spend at least $450 million per annum in health bills that are directly associated with ailments due to air pollution.
The Pak-EPA blames the motor vehicle industry. “The presence of carbon monoxide from vehicular emissions is the major source of degradation in the ambient air quality,” observed Asif Shujja Khan, director general of Pak-EPA.
He says that the number of vehicles in the country has risen by 400 per cent over the past 20 years — from 0.8 million to about four million in 2004. “The average compound growth is 11 per cent per annum.”
Poor urban public transport systems and easy car financing schemes have contributed to an explosion in vehicular traffic.
Faced with a similar situation of official apathy in New Delhi, the Supreme Court of India stepped in to order local authorities to ban polluting fuels such as diesel and replace them with compressed natural gas (CNG). When it passed its orders in 1998, India’s apex court also stipulated time-frames for local authorities to follow — all taxis and three-wheelers were to be replaced with vehicles running on CNG by 2001 and the entire bus fleet (around 3,000 buses) converted to CNG mode by the following year.
There was enormous resistance from lobbies that safeguarded the interests of groups ranging from powerful manufacturers of diesel engines to those who profited by large-scale adulteration of diesel, but the court, determined to protect the health of citizens, succeeded in producing a model which is now being held up as a model for all developing countries.
As far as Pakistan is concerned, the country has not been able even to tackle the threat to human health posed by leaded fuels, although unleaded gasoline was introduced in 2001. The majority of vehicles run on leaded fuel.
“Grades of gasoline that are sold in the market contain about 350 mg/litre of lead. This is much higher than leaded gasoline in other countries which usually contains no more than 150 mg/litre,” confided a ministry of environment official who did not want to be named.
A spokesperson for the Pakistan Medical Association said that several studies have confirmed the presence of high concentrations of lead in the blood of schoolchildren, adults and traffic police, in addition to finding high lead levels in roadside air samples.
With the official clean fuel initiative launched in 1995, a non-starter, the government introduced alternatives like the CNG. Fewer than 400,000 vehicles have been converted to CNG. Official estimates were unavailable.
The Pak-EPA has a five-year plan that will enforce motor vehicle emission standards and phase out lead and sulphur from fuel by 2010.
Meanwhile, a spokesman for the Pakistan Automotive Manufacturers Association said the demand for private passenger cars was increasing daily. “Only in March 2006 the consumer demand for cars went up by 27 per cent as compared to the same period last year. We sold as many as 15,994 car units and 42,707 motorbikes in March 2006,” the spokesman said.
Mohammad Arshad of the Islamabad-based Network for Consumer Protection observed: “We simply cannot ignore the health and environmental costs that are associated with consumerism. There has to be some sort of a balance between economic and social policy objectives, which should not be conflicting.” — Dawn/IPS News Service
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