five days after arriving in the us , I noticed that the asthma, that had been my constant companion in Delhi, had almost completely disappeared. Only then did I truly realise to what extent the air we breathe has become poison. Today, tens of millions of city dwellers who are similarly affected with mild to severe asthma, believe that it is an allergic reaction to one or the other of the virus infections that abound in their environment. What their bodies are actually doing is to rebel against the lead, benzene, nitrous and sulphurous gases, but above all against the particulate matter with which the air is loaded.

Far from doing anything about it, the Indian government is busy reinforcing a structure of vested interests that will soon make it impossible to change things for the better in the near future. What has put this killing machine in place is the policy of pricing gasoline two-and-a-half times higher than diesel. This is being done (for almost three decades) though diesel has an energy content 15 per cent higher than gasoline and is priced accordingly in industrialised and most developing countries.

This is happening because gasoline and aviation turbine fuel ( atf ) are being grossly overpriced in order to pay a huge subsidy on kerosene and on domestic cooking gas, liquefied petroleum gas ( lpg ). In 1997-98, this subsidy amounted to about Rs 9,000 crore. This price differential has led to a galloping increase in diesel consumption. Diesel accounts for 43 per cent of the consumption of all petroleum products in the country. What is more, as the price differential between gasoline and diesel has widened, so has the rate of growth of consumption of diesel. In the early 1970s, before the first oil price increase, the consumption of gasoline was growing more rapidly than diesel. Today, it is growing at 6 per cent per annum while the growth of diesel consumption has gone into double digits. The threat this poses to human health arises from the fact that diesel exhaust fumes are a far greater danger to human health than gasoline. The reason is the very high level of sulphur and particulate matter in diesel exhaust fumes.

For more than two years, the New Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment has been waging a relentless campaign to make the government and the public aware of the immense danger that both pose to public health. It has pointed out that Indian diesel contains 0.5 per cent sulphur against an international norm of 0.1 per cent and a much stricter norm imposed in Scandinavia of 0.01 per cent. The sulphur is not only a direct threat to human health but also increases the emission particulates