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:
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”.)