Pardon me if I'm sounding like a latter day Cassandra wrapped in a wet towel, but my heart does not leap up in joy, unlike the poet's, on learning that both Air-India and Indigo have ordered 500 additional planes each for their fleet. Nor did said heart do a backflip when the Civil Aviation Minister announced, at a rally presided over by the Prime Minister last week, that the number of airports would be doubled in the next ten years. Even if we discount some of this as hyperbole attributable to his Chief Ministerial ambitions in MP, even then that's a lot of new airports- about 200, I believe.
It's a recipe for environmental disaster. The United Nations Secretary-General has just released the latest IPCC report, which has warned us that the global warming threshold of 1.5* Celsius will be crossed in 1935 because emissions, instead of declining to 1990 levels as targeted, are actually going UP every year. The reason we are headed for this environmental apocalypse, in spite of technological innovations ( renewables, EVs, plant based meat, plastic substitutes etc.) is simple: we are just not willing to change our life styles to a more sustainable model. For the vast majority of mankind it is business as usual; we continue as before in what we eat, how we travel, how we over exploit finite natural resources like water and trees, how we build, how we consume power. For an increasingly purblind homo sapiens comfort and convenience are more important than the future of the planet. Flying is one dimension of this stupidity.
The number of air travelers will double to 8.2 billion by 2036; 75% of them travel for pleasure and don't need to go by plane. Aviation spews about 1.50 billion tonnes of GHGs into the atmosphere every year and is the most polluting form of travel. Below is the table for emissions by various modes of travel per passenger kilometer:
Plane 154 gms
[For one business class passenger it is 462 gms, and 616 gms for a first class one]
Car 171 gms for one passenger/car
43 gms if 4 passengers
Bus 104 gms
Rail 41 gms
Add to this dismal scenario the environmental and social costs of building airports- thousands of hectares of usually prime land concretised for each airport, thousands of families displaced and pushed into penury, millions of trees felled, hundreds of megawatts of additional power needed to operate the airports. To take just one example closest to where I live, the new Jewar airport coming up in Noida: when all four phases are complete, a total of 4752 hectares of land would be acquired; 19961 families (37025 individuals) would be displaced in just the first two of four phases. All this so that 4 million passengers can take off and land here every year- that's about 20000 flights. This is in addition to the 60 million well heeled chaps doing the same at the Indira Gandhi airport every year.
An even more harebrained example is from my own state of Himachal where an obdurate government is hell-bent on building a so-called "international" airport in Mandi which no one wants. It will destroy 237 hectares of irrigated, multi-cropped farmland and forests, uproot a population of 12000, mainly Dalits and OBCs, seriously dent the state's food growing capacity, and in no way help the tourism sector (which is the specious justification for it). The state's three existing airports are dismal failures, functioning well below 50% of their designed capacity, and yet the govt. is ready to splurge Rs. 5000 crores on the project, even though it does not have the money to pay Dearness Allowance to its employees.
And we want to reduce global warming?
Aviation is one of the biggest force multipliers of inequity- economic, environmental, social- especially in a backward country like ours. It is an elitist sector because it serves not even 1% of the population whereas the costs are borne by farmers, landless labourers, villagers and the other 99% of the population. It is also not an essential service within a country because alternatives are available which are far less damaging to the environment. I refer here especially to the railways.
I have never been able to understand why people fly on short-haul routes (3 to 4 hours) instead of taking a train or going by car. Take for example a route I am familiar with, Delhi-Chandigarh. It takes four hours by train and five by road. In contrast, a flyer will take the same time, if not more, house to house if one factors in the drive to and from the city to the airport at both ends, the need to report at least 90 minutes before departure, the actual flying time, and the time taken to deplane and collect one's baggage; it is also costlier by a multiple of at least three. So why do people fly on short-haul ? Elitism? Snobbishness? Pure habit? You tell me, because I can't figure it out.
This is where the govt. comes in, or should come in, if it was not so mesmerised by big ticket projects and the prospect of bountiful payola from contractors. It should discourage, as a policy, short-haul flights and simultaneously expand on a war footing the rail network and services. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it should give up its love affair with expressways (at the risk of disappointing Mr. Gadkari) and spend the same money on new high speed rail tracks and rakes so that it could operate more trains. It is in this context that one has to commend the emphasis imparted to the new series of Vande Bharat trains, of which there are now 14. They match the planes for comfort, catering, snob value and total journey time and are far cheaper. The environmental benefits are even more telling: one Vande Bharat can carry the same number of passengers as 11 short-haul flights. If we extrapolate from the table in para 3 above, this means that every 300 km run of a Vande Bharat saves 75 tonnes of CO2 and other emissions as compared to corresponding number of flights for the same number of passengers.
While we are busy redacting the Moghuls and making blood money off Ukraine, other countries are beginning to realise the immense contribution of aviation to global warming, and are beginning to take steps to regulate its expansion. The U.K. has finally given up plans to build a third runway at Heathrow, in deference to the protests of its citizens. ( Incidentally, the Jewar airport will have five runways !). The Dutch govt. has decided to reduce flights to and from the Schiphol airport by 50000 per annum- from 500,000 to 450,000. ( The matter is in the courts but the govt. is determined to push it through).
Sweden has spawned a citizens' movement in 2019 called "We Stay on the Ground" which asks people to pledge not to fly. Tens of thousands of pledges have been obtained so far and a new word has been coined to convey flight shaming- "flygskam". People are responding positively- the number of flyers came down by 3.7% in the first year itself and train travel has increased by 30%. So far eight countries have joined this movement- U.K, USA, Canada, Denmark, Belgium, France and Germany. It is no coincidence that these countries feature at the top in the list of happiest countries in the world. They value their natural environment and health, add a price to it and are prepared to pay the price.
Unlike us, the Indian elite, who think that Mr. Modi and Baba Ramdev have instant solutions to all the problems of the planet, and we can continue with our ecocidal life styles for ever. We do not for even a moment think of the massive inequity and injustice inherent in this life style. Consider this: every time you take a business class flight from Delhi to Mumbai to attend an Ambani wedding (or whatever) you are adding as much GHG emissions to the atmosphere in two hours as the average Indian does in 6 months !
Will Niti Ayog do the maths and stop harping on that old chestnut of "historical injustice" by the West to justify policies that encourage more emissions ? We missed the industrial revolution bus long ago, and should stop cutting off our nose to spite someone else's face. Mr. Modi and his team should take time off from tiger safaris and consider some hard decisions. Like banning private jets altogether, impose a moratorium on new short-haul flights, stop building new airports unless they are needed for strategic reasons, impose a hefty carbon tax on air tickets, ask airlines to stop their frequent flyer programmes as they only incentivise more air travel, stop dishing out those dozens of free air-tickets to MPs and MLAs, make it mandatory for govt. employees to travel by train instead of by air. That would be a start. The meek may or may not inherit the world but the rich certainly don't own it.
Cut down on building new airports??? God forbid! I mean, after all our 'selected' representatives need to visit folk like us every 5 years to assure us that ache din are just around the corner. So are you suggesting that those poor sods dirty their footwear and crumple their starched kurtas sitting for long hours in a car driving through dusty roads where they may get to be accosted by the unseemly sight of heaps of garbage on the roadsides and the downtrodden living in abject poverty, awaiting the regularly promised fallout of our galloping economy.
ReplyDeleteYour suggestion is akin to cruelty to animals. On a much larger scale.
As to global warming, have we not been told that it is a figment of our imagination. It is not the earth, but us who are aging!!
So glad to read this warning of ECOCIDE that we are committing WITTINGLY every single day... Love the Swedes anyways for their unbelievable belief in universal goodness that borders very often on naivette but also puts then on top of the happiness chartbuster! And for the way their home grown author Frederick Backman recreates their Stay on the Ground type of world in his fascinating books.... Their simple world almost seems Utopian! Yet they stay rooted to the ground valuing the rewards of simplicity in their tiny CARBON FOOTPRINT while we race to beat the YETI! For the life of me i can't understand how the approaching deadlines of apocalypse leave us unfazed? If we were ostriches then at least we knew that danger was lurking closeby... But we are a tribe that keeps God working overtime while we go on unabashedly marauding the planet in a BAU BUSINESS AS USUAL lifestyle! This is another wake up call... Calculating our nuisance potential is elementary if we simply audit of consumption habits and patterns...e.g waste water reuse, also what do we do with the Amazon packaging after we year open to grab the goodies.. Where is our thinking cap to foster REUSE INNOVATIVELY ENOUGH TO CREATE PRODUCTS n LIVELIHOODs!!! Let this graduate from drawing room conversation to actually action... Just like the youngster who mobiles many to clean Mumbai beaches with his determination that Change begins With ME!
ReplyDeleteAgree with you avay, always loved train journeys. Only toilets are a eye sore!! Wish we could import the fantastic Japanese toilets! Amita
ReplyDeleteThe Protectors of Nature are the archetypal urban well-heeled with a high social profile, overdosed on air travel during their working careers. It decants fluidly from them to underfoot aviation today, when they see glaciers disappearing and trees vanishing. How many of the Nature Wardens among us have travelled by rail for journeys that stretched overnight, forsaking a flight - when we had the financial means to afford one. The exhortation to substitute aviation with ground travel - in its present state - may be met with pushback. The solutions proffered are a bit of a simplistic binary alternating between the dos and don'ts, that unwittingly shepherd the nation towards authoritarian diktat if enforced.
ReplyDeleteWhich is not to say that aviation must be pursued with frenzied zeal or that India needs 220 airports by 2030. As per a 2018 report, there were over 90 percent of airports belonging to AAI that were loss making back then. Even today so many of them stay defunct for want of passengers.
A better solution from the Shuklan stable may be to build an unmatched rail network to ply high speed trains on, which will connect distances of a thousand or more kilometres within 8 hours. Avay Shukla has elaborated along with the math on the reduction of carbon footprint that railways achieve. There is need for a comprehensive, modern rail ecosystem to facilitate such travel. This may be the logical and voluntary catalyst for most to realign their mode of movement from air to rail, doing away with State imposition. Voluntary shift will be the biggest enabler with a multiplier effect. And if Vishwaguru is convinced to apply unto himself that which he impinges upon others, we may achieve our net zero emission status well before 2047.
The modus operandi of the developed world is no torchlight in our journey towards carbon reduction. Sweden and the rest of Europe, and the US, are mini worlds on the Earth incomparable in their existence with that of the subcontinent. India must reduce its carbon footprint for its preservation, but aping the Western world may not be the best route for it to embark on.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteIndia has much to learn on environmentally sensitivity like european countries are cutting back on air travel realising this being one of the most polluting modes of travel. Shudder to think being the most populous nation in the world and if we embrace aviation for the masses, the level of damage is unthinkable.
ReplyDeleteOur leaders/policymakers have become blind to this, development at all costs model followed by our leaders is self destructive. The analogy of a dog chewing a bone till it bleeds and sucks its own blood and thinking it is getting blood from the bone, not realising it is it's own blood.
Not really. We are letting our fear get ahead of us by imagining aviation as a means of mass rapid travel. If after 6 decades of Indian aviation we have merely 2 to 3 percent of our population travelling by air, it is resoundingly clear that this is not a common mode of transportation and will never be so in India. Let us rid ourselves of nebulous apprehensions and cease to connect fictitious dots that will fly us at best on a flight of fancy.
DeleteIt is quite clear that blind hope is getting the better of science in Mr. Patankar's assessment of the damage aviation is likely to cause to the environment in the next decade or so. He is ignoring the figures when he maintains that the number of flyers in India will never be large enough to pose a problem. I would invite him to read the 9th August, 2022, issue of the Business Standard in which the AAI (Airports Authority Of India) has projected that the no. of flyers will increase from 341 million in 2019-20 to 827 million by 2032-33, an increase of almost half a billion! This is in line with the ICAO's ( a UN body) assessment that air traffic in India is growing at 17% per annum, the highest in the world. Mr. Patankar may be comfortable with these figures ( he has the right to be so) but he is deluding himself if he thinks these are "fictitious dots" or "flights of fancy".
ReplyDeleteI am siding with optimism and empirical data, not embracing blind hope or wrestling with Science as accused by Mr. Shukla. I would rather go with real numbers than with statistical projections. And with the epiphanous Navjot Sidhu, who has equated Statistics with Lamp Posts that the drunkard leans on - only for support, not for illumination.
ReplyDeleteSo, please "illuminate" us with the "real numbers", sir. We could all do with a little bit of your optimism.
ReplyDeleteThen rejoice in the knowledge that merely 4 to 5 percent of Indians fly as a means of travel.
ReplyDeleteFeel comforted that India contributed 7 percent of global emissions of CO2 as per 2020 data, of which 4 to 5 percent was attributable to civil aviation.
Heave a sigh from knowing that 123 million Indians flew domestically in 2022, and 136 million in 2023, as compared to 275 million who flew domestically in 2019. International fliers have been kept away because the data for those who travelled in 2023 is not known. As a metric the ratio is about 25 percent compared to those who travelled domestically.
Lastly, know that 1 percent of Indians account for 45 percent of all aviation in India.
These figures should support, if not illuminate, that Indian aviation is nowhere by any stretch of imagination going to become a mass enabler of human travel. Therefore, all who fear it to be the prime mover of pollution and toxic emissions must remove such thoughts from their fertile minds simply because the numbers do not seem to sustain their apprehensions.
This is not to say that aviation is not a contributor to GHG. It is. And disproportionately high as a source. Fortunately Indians will be spared the culpability of contributing to the same on account of their limited aviation travel.
Anyone wishing to experience optimism further must consume a sizeable quantity of the spirits and come into their moment of revelation. So that they may rely upon statistics for support as well as for illumination.