(This story was first published on 24 August 2021 and is being republished from The Quint's archives ahead of Diwali as Delhi readies itself for another bout of severe smog.)
The Chief Minister of Delhi has inaugurated India’s first-ever smog tower in the heart of the city to help combat rising air pollution in the national capital. The 20-metre-long structure, which has been supposedly set up to improve air quality in a radius of around one kilometre, has been built at a cost of ₹20 crore.
And the optics look good. For a city that has been bogged down with smog every winter, being proactive, getting technology to fix the problem shows the government in the right light. After all the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP from East Delhi, Gautam Gambhir, did the same in another busy part of the city. These quick-fix solutions continue to find favour with our politicians despite repeated warnings by scientists that smog towers cant help clean the city’s air. Yet politicians often go for the solution that shows them as being proactive. The late William Safire, who wrote a column ‘On Language’ for the New York Times, observed, “When politicians fret about the public perception of a decision more than the substance of the decision itself, we’re living in a world of optics.”