Air purifiers to fight Delhi pollution: When the state abandons public good

The severe air pollution in parts of north India has led people to find private solutions to a public problem in the form of air-purifiers. This follows the purchase of water purifiers by households because of poor quality of water supplied by civic authorities. Do these solutions represent the failure of our state? The author writes about how the state has abandoned public good in this Business Standard special.

What is the connection between the air that we breathe, the on-going massive advertising campaigns for indoor air-purifiers and relationships between citizens and the state? It is a history of the present that tells us a great deal about some of the most fundamental aspects of our lives and the choices we might make for a decent future.

In the period since 1991, the most significant aspect of our national life has been the changing nature of the state. In all post-colonial societies, the state apparatus has – till recently – enjoyed almost sacred status as the progenitor of the public good. Usually, the post-colonial nation-state was closely identified with a specific political party – the Congress in India, ZANU-PF in Zimbabwe, for example – and the latter’s moral legitimacy was closely linked to its role in creating a welfare state. In the immediate post-colonial period – the Nehruvian years of high nationalism – though various forms of private capital plied their trade, the determinative role of the state in realms as diverse as culture, economy, family life, urbanization and infrastructure provision remained largely unquestioned. The state enjoyed a state-ness that was next to godliness and attempts to interrogate the role of the state in the life of the nation – such as that by the right-of-centre, Swantantra Party – died a lingering death. It was a period that required stateliness to hold together a society economically and socially ravaged by extractive colonial machinery. Nehru was not a statist as much as a visionary pragmatist.