Bombay High Court asks how officials can ‘have a peaceful sleep’ as Mumbai’s smog worsens, calls it an emergency

The Bombay High Court on Wednesday, October 21, called Mumbai’s worsening smog an “emergency” and pulled up the city’s civic body, the Maharashtra Pollution Control Board (MPCB) and the Mumbai Police for failing to enforce its orders against air and noise pollution during the festive season.

A bench of Justices Girish S Kulkarni and Neela Gokhale was hearing a public interest litigation that the court had taken up on its own, on noise pollution and the bursting of firecrackers on streets during festivals. The judges said it was “shocking” that the coastal city was surpassing Delhi in pollution levels, and noted that visibility in Mumbai had dropped below 500 metres on Tuesday.

“We don’t understand how those who are supposed to implement this can even have a peaceful sleep, because this is an emergency on their part. For their respective departments, this is an emergency situation with lakhs of people facing it,” Justice Kulkarni said, The Indian Express reported.

The bench said Mumbai’s geography should have worked in its favour. “This is shocking. The city has a sea breeze coming, which has a lot of open spaces, the whole openness of the sea, still we are facing this... You should see to it that Mumbai skies are clear,” the court said, according to Bar & Bench.

Justice Gokhale, citing news reports, said officials could point to air quality readings from the cleanest parts of the city to claim that pollution had come down, while ignoring the air near traffic signals and in slum areas. “We don’t know whether they (civic and police officers) are also breathing the same air that we are breathing, or if they have some different air that they are not alive to,” she remarked.

The judges also cited an incident on Tuesday in south Mumbai, where firecrackers were burst on busy streets in front of a police station near Crawford Market, despite the court’s ban on bursting crackers on public streets. The court called it a “rampant breach” of its orders and said the police machinery was “extremely slow” to act. In its written order, the bench said “the wheels of the official machinery appear to be turning too slowly to comply even with the basic preliminary compliances as ordered by the Court.”

The city’s air had already been in the news. On Wednesday, the US-based monitor IQAir ranked Mumbai fourth among the world’s most polluted cities with an AQI of 165, just ahead of Delhi at 164, while the Central Pollution Control Board recorded a lower AQI of 113 for Mumbai that afternoon, The Indian Express reported.

The court has directed the Mumbai Police Commissioner to meet all police station in-charges, draw up a standard operating procedure and file an affidavit on enforcing the ban on street firecrackers and sound systems used without permission. The BMC and the MPCB must publish public awareness notices on social media by October 24 and file compliance affidavits. The case will be heard next on October 26.