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Jonathan Braude

India is big on astrology. It is also big on annoying little extra touches to make your stay more difficult, possibly on the advice of government astrologers.

  It may well have been some official 'Raj-guru', for instance, who decreed, years ago, that every international flight, wherever it was from, should arrive at Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi in the middle of the night.

  Charts would have been drawn up, times measured against squares, aspects and planetary transits plotted.

 Then, eyebrows abristle, the fearsome old Brahmin would have marched impressively into the office of the Minister for Aviation Inefficiency and given the order. Any plane arriving in the capital between the hours of 5am and midnight must be forced to circle until the 12th stroke has sounded.

  Normally, his name would have been cursed. It is cursed whenever bleary-eyed travellers stumble irritably to the baggage carousel. It is cursed thrice and thrice again as they shuffle sleepily through the airport's endless immigration queues, negotiate their way past pestering taxi touts and arrive at hotels at 3am - only to find the reservation has been lost.

  But on this particular occasion, Week Ending was prepared to admit the small hours might be an auspicious time for landings after all.

  Had we arrived in daylight we would not have been able to leave the airport. Crowds of infuriated and stranded passengers would, for once, have been pestering the taxi drivers, while the drivers affected that noncommittal, unseeing see-through-you stare normally carried by travellers avoiding beggars and touts. Unless, that is, they could extort three or four times the normal fare out of an Indian or 20 times the normal fare out of a foreigner.

  For Wednesday, it turned out, was the day the drivers of the city's 250,000 commercial vehicles went on strike.

  They were angry at the Delhi city administration's plan to phase out all vehicles over 15 years old in a long-overdue attempt to reduce pollution.

 Federation of Transport Unions Congress (FTUC) President Jaswant Singh Arora said there were 80,000 old vehicles in the capital and at least a million people depended on them for a living. The FTUC also wanted pollution reduced, but not this way.

  The odd thing is, the city had already withdrawn the decision to phase the old bangers out. With an election on Monday, the last thing Delhi's embattled Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) administration wanted was to lose an estimated 100,000 votes. The FTUC, backed with the usual cynicism by the rival Congress Party, just wanted to drive home the point.

  It would be nice to believe the strike had at least meant a few hundred tonnes of hydrocarbon waste had not been pumped into the atmosphere for a day. It probably did not.

 If they do not happen to be paying for the fuel themselves, Delhi drivers, like their Hong Kong counterparts, prefer to leave engines running.

 Government figures show some 2,000 tonnes of pollutants a day are belched into the city's atmosphere. Some 64 per cent of that is vehicular pollution.

  Certainly, by the end of the journey to the hotel, our eyes and throats were as sore as they always are after a drive through Delhi.

 So, next morning, Week Ending got on the phone to the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), a non-governmental organisation fighting an uphill battle against the polluters.

  Using models based on earlier epidemiological studies by the World Bank, the group has calculated that in Delhi alone 10,000 people a year now die of respiratory diseases brought on by or aggravated by air pollution.

  Anumita Roychowdhury, the group's spokesman on air quality, was in fighting mood. The official backsliding had been such a blatant and 'callous' election ploy that the CSE had complained to the Election Commission - which had banned last-minute political manoeuvres of this sort.

 Unfortunately, the commission did not think the matter serious enough to pursue.

  So now the CSE was taking the matter into its own hands, and had launched an advertising campaign urging the public to jam the telephone lines to the Delhi chief minister's office with complaints about the U-turn on old vehicles. The idea was to show there were more votes to be gained looking after the environment and public health than looking after the transport industry.

  These are sceptical times. Even Indians now take their fortune tellers with a large pinch of salt.

 But we suspect environmentalists would have more luck if they succeeded in getting the astrologers on their side than with telephone power.

  Who knows? If the Raj-guru said the month of April, say, (once the fresh New Delhi administration was comfortably installed) was a dangerously inauspicious day for not announcing anti-pollution controls, the chief minister might feel secure enough to listen.



Auspicious time for cleaner air