Hawai chappal to hawai yatra: Flying to an ecocidal future

Pardon me if I’m sounding like a latter day Cassandra wrapped in a wet towel, but my heart does not leap up in joy, unlike the poet’s, on learning that both Air India and Indigo have ordered 500 additional planes each for their fleet. Nor did the said heart do a backflip when the civil aviation minister announced, at a rally presided over by the Prime Minister last week, that the number of airports would be doubled in the next ten years. Even if we discount some of this as hyperbole attributable to his Chief Ministerial ambitions in MP, even then that’s a lot of new airports— about 200, I believe.

It’s a recipe for environmental disaster. The UN Secretary General has recently released the latest IPCC report, which has warned us that the global warming threshold of 1.5 degree Celsius may be crossed by 2037 because emissions, instead of declining to 1990 levels as targeted, are actually going up every year. The reason we are headed for this environmental apocalypse, in spite of technological innovations (renewables, EVs, plant-based meat, plastic substitutes etc.) is simple: we are just not willing to change our lifestyles to a more sustainable model. For the vast majority of mankind, it is business as usual: we continue as before in what we eat, how we travel, how we overexploit finite natural resources like water and trees, how we build, how we consume power. For an increasingly purblind homo sapiens, comfort and convenience are more important than the future of the planet. Flying is one dimension of this stupidity.

The number of air travellers will double to 8.2 billion by 2036; 75 per cent of them travel for pleasure and don’t need to go by plane. Aviation spews about 1.5 billion tonne of GHGs into the atmosphere every year and is the most polluting form of travel. Below is the table for emissions by various modes of travel per passenger kilometre:

• Airplane: 154 gm (462 gm for businessclass; 616 gm for first class)

• Car: 171 gm (for one passenger/car; 43 gm if 4 passengers)

• Bus: 104 gm

• Train: 41 gm

Add to this dismal scenario the environmental and social costs of building airports—thousands of hectares of usually prime land concretised for each airport, thousands of families displaced and pushed into penury, millions of trees felled, hundreds of megawatts of additional power needed to operate the airports. To take just one example closest to where I live, the new Jewar airport coming up in Noida: when all four phases are complete, a total of 4,752 hectares of land would have been acquired; 19,961 families (37,025 individuals) displaced in just the first two of four phases. All this so that four million passengers can take off and land here every year—that is about 20,000 flights. This is in addition to the 60 million wellheeled chaps doing the same at the Indira Gandhi airport every year.

A worse example is from my own state of Himachal, where the government is hell-bent on building a so-called ‘international’ airport in Mandi that no one wants. It will destroy 237 hectares of irrigated, multi-cropped farmland and forests, uproot a population of 12,000, mainly Dalits and OBCs, seriously dent the state’s food growing capacity, and in no way help the tourism sector (which is the specious justification for it). The state’s three existing airports are dismal failures, functioning well below 50 per cent of their designed capacity, and yet the government is ready to splurge Rs 5,000 crore, on the project, even though it does not have the money to pay Dearness Allowance to its employees.

And we want to reduce global warming?

Aviation is one of the biggest force multipliers of inequity—economic, environmental, social—especially in a backward country like ours. It is an elitist sector because it serves not even 1 per cent of the population whereas the costs are borne by farmers, landless labourers, villagers and the other 99 per cent. It is also not an essential service within a country because alternatives are available, which are far less damaging to the environment. I refer here especially to the railways.

I have never been able to understand why people fly on short-haul routes (3-4 hours) instead of taking a train or going by car. Take for example a route I am familiar with, Delhi-Chandigarh. It takes four hours by train and five by road. In contrast, a flyer will take the same time, if not more, house to house if one factors in the drive to and from the city to the airport at both ends, the need to report at least 90 minutes before departure, the actual flying time, and the time taken to deplane and collect one’s baggage; it is also costlier by a multiple of at least three. So why do people fly on short-haul? Elitism? Snobbishness? Pure habit? You tell me, because I can’t figure it out.

This is where the government comes in, or should come in, if it was not so mesmerised by big ticket projects and the prospect of bountiful payola from contractors. It should discourage, as a policy, short-haul flights and simultaneously expand on a war footing the rail network and services. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it should give up its love affair with expressways (at the risk of disappointing Mr Gadkari) and spend the same money on new high-speed rail tracks and rakes so that it could operate more trains.

It is in this context that one has to commend the emphasis imparted to the new series of Vande Bharat trains, of which there are now 14. They match the planes for comfort, catering, snob value and total journey time and are far cheaper. The environmental benefits are even more telling: one Vande Bharat can carry the same number of passengers as 11 short-haul flights. If we extrapolate from the table in para 3 above, this means that every 300 km run of a Vande Bharat saves 75 tonnes of CO2 and other emissions compared taken to deplane and collect one’s baggage; it is also costlier by a multiple of at least three. So why do people fly on short-haul? Elitism? Snobbishness? Pure habit? You tell me, because I can’t figure it out. This is where the government comes in, or should come in, if it was not so mesmerised by big ticket projects and the prospect of bountiful payola from contractors. It should discourage, as a policy, short-haul flights and simultaneously expand on a war footing the rail network and services. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it should give up its love affair with expressways (at the risk of disappointing Mr Gadkari) and spend the same money on new high-speed rail tracks and rakes so that it could operate more trains. It is in this context that one has to commend the emphasis imparted to the new series of Vande Bharat trains, of which there are now 14. They match the planes for comfort, catering, snob value and total journey time and are far cheaper. The environmental benefits are even more telling: one Vande Bharat can carry the same number of passengers as 11 short-haul flights. If we extrapolate from the table in para 3 above, this means that every 300 km run of a Vande Bharat saves 75 tonnes of CO2 and other emissions compared to a corresponding number of flights for the same number of passengers.

While we are busy redacting the Mughals and making blood money off Ukraine, other countries are beginning to realise the immense contribution of aviation to global warming, and are beginning to take steps to regulate its expansion. The UK has finally given up plans to build a third runway at Heathrow, in deference to the protests of its citizens. (The Jewar airport will have five runways!) The Dutch have decided to reduce flights to and from Schiphol airport by 50,000 a year. Sweden spawned a citizens’ movement in 2019 called ‘We Stay on the Ground’, which asks people to pledge not to fly. Tens of thousands of pledges have been obtained so far and a new word has been coined to convey flight shaming—‘flygskam’.

People are responding positively—the number of flyers came down by 3.7 per cent in the first year itself and train travel has increased by 30 per cent. So far, eight countries have joined the movement—UK, USA, Canada, Denmark, Belgium, France and Germany. Unlike us, the Indian elite, who probably think that Mr. Modi and Baba Ramdev have instant solutions to all the problems of the planet, and we can continue with our ecocidal lifestyles for ever.