Malicious pollution reports

By Abhijit Menon-Sen <>

Before we installed a towel rail in the bathroom, we kept clean clothes on an old newspaper on the washbasin counter while bathing. It kept the clothes dry and kept me entertained while brushing my teeth for several months (I would unfold and refold it differently every few days when the top stories began to seem familiar).

Pollution report malicious, incorrect: Javadekar” dated June 7, 2016 quoted the reaction of the Union Minister for Environment, Prakash Javadekar, to a paper that was widely reported with headlines like “Life expectancy in Delhi has reduced by six years because of air pollution, reveals study”. Here's a clipping:

Newspaper clipping: Pollution report malicious, incorrect: Javadekar

The original paper, “Premature mortality in India due to PM2.5 and ozone exposure”, written by scientists at IITM Pune and published in Geophysical Research Letters, was not immediately available for download. The Minister's scathing indictment shows that he is only too aware of the threat posed by Elsevier journals.

Of course, this is hardly the first attempt to maliciously target India with overblown pollution reports:

Volcanic activity in modern-day India, not an asteroid, may have killed the dinosaurs, according to a new study.

Tens of thousands of years of lava flow from the Deccan Traps, a volcanic region near Mumbai in present-day India, may have spewed poisonous levels of sulfur and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and caused the mass extinction through the resulting global warming and ocean acidification, the research suggests.

Barely a month after his astute recognition of this pattern, however, a cabinet reshuffle saw Prakash Javadekar reassigned to the Ministry of Human Resources and Development.

(Aside: “Javadekar does a U-turn after questioning pollution study”.)