How fair is our air? The injustice of procedure, distribution, and recognition within the discourse of air pollution in Delhi, India

ABSTRACT

The risk profile of air pollution generates multiple meanings of justice for diverse stakeholders. We examined 535 articles from two Indian newspapers published between 2017 and 2020 and obtained 13 concepts of justice pertinent to ambient air pollution in Delhi. Employing the theoretical perspective of environmental justice, we observed the prevalence of procedural and distributive justice discourses with dominant participation from non-governmental organizations and academic institutions. Recognition justice emerged the most underrepresented of all discourses. We used Discourse Network Analysis to reveal the prominence of Indian citizens, the Supreme Court of India, and farmers in the justice debate, and an overall restricted participation of the government bodies. Our findings highlight polarization among the academic and the non-academic actors on the disproportionate effect of air pollution. For air pollution mitigation in Delhi, we suggest organized and inclusive participation by diverse stakeholders in decision-making, acknowledging socio-cultural differences among populations.

KEYWORDS:

• Air pollution
• India
• environmental justice
• media discourses
• discourse network analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Refer WHO website: https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution#tab=tab_2 (accessed on 7 November 2021).

2. Ambient air pollution is the air pollution present in outdoor environments.

3. Schedule caste is a constitutional term to represent the socio-economically disadvantaged communities by birth in India.

4. Refers to environmental justice in context of air pollution.

5. News media is one important source of information capturing the nature and articulation of prevalent discourses by various stakeholders (see Stoddart, Haluza-DeLay, and Tindall 2016, 210).

6. For example, the National Clean Air Programme (NCAP) was launched by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change in 2019; the Graded Response Action Plan (GRAP) was implemented in Delhi-NCR in 2017; the Comprehensive Action Plan was notified by the Government of India in 2018, etc.

7. Non-attainment cities include cities violating prescribed National Ambient Air Quality Standards in India.

8. Refer manual for details: https://github.com/leifeld/dna/tree/master/manual. Also see Joshi and Swarnakar (2021, 495–96) for coding process.

9. A one-mode congruence network comprises of nodes that represent the actors, and a link between two nodes portrays a mutual agreement or disagreement on a concept. A two-mode network comprises of two types of nodes: actor and concept. A link between an actor node and a concept node stands for a statement made by the actor in agreement or disagreement with the concept (see Ghinoi and Steiner (2020, 218) for details).

10. Refer the US Environmental Protection Agency’s definition of environmental justice (Accessed from https://www.epa.gov/environmentaljustice, 7 September 2021).

11. CAQM is a commission set up by the Government of India to address poor air quality in the National Capital Region and the adjoining states.

12. IIT is an abbreviation for the Indian Institute of Technology.

13. In addition, there could be another possibility of media biasedness towards the government bodies, resulting in non-representation of government’s disapproval on the popular ‘justice’ beliefs of air pollution. However, we have tried to minimize this possibility in our paper by selecting our database from two different news media sources – The Times of India, and The Hindu – with central and left leaning ideological orientations, respectively.

14. Odd–even rule is a traffic rationing measure implemented by the Government of Delhi that allows plying on roads of vehicles with a registration number ending in an odd or even number on alternate days.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bhavna Joshi

Bhavna Joshi is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the Department of Sociology, Virginia Tech, USA. Her research interests are environmental governance, responsible innovation, environmental justice, risk, trust, and precision agriculture. She obtained the titles Master of Science and Master of Philosophy in Anthropology from the University of Delhi. Her work has been published in Current Sociology.

Pradip Swarnakar

Pradip Swarnakar is a Professor of Sociology at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, India and Adjunct Fellow, Social and Political Sciences Programme, University of Technology Sydney, Australia. He has been a visiting scholar at the University of San Francisco, University of Helsinki, and Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research GmbH-UFZ. He is an associate editor of the social science section of Heliyon. He is co-editor of the book Bottom-up Approaches in Governance and Adaptation for Sustainable Development: Case Studies from India and Bangladesh (SAGE Publications, 2017).