The Variety of Methods to Reduce the Level of Pollution in Taj Mahal

The Taj Mahal is an enormous ivory-white mausoleum built of marble, that sits on the banks of the Yaruma river in Agra, India. It was constructed over 20 years in the 17th century by Mughal emperor Shah Jahan to house the remains of his favorite wife, Mumtaz Mahal, as she once requested he build a monument for their love. The famed monument translates to the ‘crown of palaces’ and is a universally admired masterpiece of the world’s heritage. It is one of the 7 Wonders of the World and one of the main tourist attractions in India.

An economic valuation of the site is yet to be completed, however, I would highly recommend this to be done using either the travel cost method or the contingent method. According to the Indian Tourism Statistics, 6.5 million people visited the Taj Mahal in 2018, with a mixture of local and overseas tourists. By calculating the costs that visitors incurred by traveling to the site, a value may be applied using the travel cost method. This is displayed in figure 1. This concept is particularly applied by assigning use-values, as visitors are directly deriving use from the site. The contingent method estimates the value that a person places on a good. By asking people their willingness to pay (WTP) to preserve the Taj or their willingness to accept (WTA) if it were to be destroyed, a value can be placed. This approach focuses mainly on non-use values of the site, such as option values, which are the value placed on individual WTP for maintaining an asset, even if there is little to no likelihood that the individual will ever use it, and occurs because of uncertainty about the continued existence of the asset and potential future use.

There is a saying that the Taj Mahal is pinkish in the morning, milky white in the evening, and golden when the moon shines. However, though this may have once been true for the famously immaculate marble monument, a combination of pollution, poor management and neglect have burdened the Taj with a 24-hour layer of yellowy-brown. India is the most polluted country in the world, and its cities are not innocent. Agra is the 9th most polluted city in the world, with levels of air pollution that are dangerous to breathe in. The problem is non-point-source, as there are many key actors and many people contributing to the air pollution. As the case is in many Asian cities, increasing car ownership has caused traffic to escalate, as seen in figure 2, while dirty air also escapes from Agra’s Mathura Oil Refinery and tannery chimneys. These pollutants – sulfur dioxide, Nox gases, and carbon-based particulates – have progressively weathered and eroded the Taj’s dazzling white façade, replacing it with a yellow luster. The acid rain from these pollutants reacts with the calcium carbonate marble, which causes damage and discoloration.

The Taj Mahal is excludable as there are entry requirements, such as a dress code and a fee, and non-rival as people can continue to enter regardless of others. Negative externalities contribute to the problem as there are flow-on effects from the pollution which have detrimental effects on the monument. These include vehicle and biomass emissions, coop residue, garbage, and municipal solid waste disposal by burning, industrial emissions, and construction and demolition. The problem is not just a local issue, but regional or even global. The effects of pollution are seen in more areas than the Taj alone and is a continuous and cumulative problem.

There has been a 10,400km2 trapezium-shaped protective boundary established around the site, called the Taj Trapezium Zone. This covers 5 districts of the Agra region and 3 World Heritage Sites - Taj Mahal, Agra Fort, and Fatehpur Sikri. A report called “Report on Environmental Impact of Mathura Refinery” (Varadharajan Committee) was published by the Government of India in 1978. The report identified the sources of pollution in the area, which were coal users comprised of: 2 power plants, ~250 small industries (primarily foundries), and a railway shunting yard. The report also included suggestions, such as no new large industries are to be built in the area without first administering appropriate comprehensive studies to assess the impact of the industries on the monument and environment. It also suggested that existing industries are to be moved away from the area and authority be established which supervises the emissions and air quality in Agra and has the jurisdiction to direct polluters to lower their levels of emissions. It was also suggested that studies should be completed to create measures such as a green belt in the surroundings. The report also stated that the use of coal in the oil refinery should be stopped until alternative cleaner technologies are available.

Despite the establishment of a protective area around the site, within which emissions are supposedly strictly controlled, photographs show a noticeable deterioration in the Taj’s condition over the last few years. Legal emission limits have been long contested by developers, and are widely ignored. Smoky funeral pyres are lit, and piles of rubbish are recurrently burned very close to the buildings. Pollution from the Yamuna River bestows a further challenge. Untreated sewage and industrial waste are discharged in from the city, creating nutrient-rich waters. These nutrients are then carried by the wind and deposited in the Taj’s increasingly porous stonework, allowing river-derived microorganisms to thrive on its surfaces, coloring them green.

Management options, such as command and control and market-based methods have the potential to decrease the levels of pollution in the air in various ways. The command and control policy is an authorized level of performance enforced through legislation. This regulation may enforce a maximum limit for the quantity of a pollutant that can be released and/or dictates that particular pollution-control technologies must be used. Fines also apply for any organization that violates the limits or fails to use specified technology or equipment. Market-based policies use markets, price,s, and other economic variables to present incentives for polluters to reduce or eradicate negative environmental externalities. Market-based methods attempt to address the market failure of externalities, such as pollution, by integrating the external cost of manufacturing or consumption activities through taxes or charges on processes or products. Examples of this include taxes, charges, and subsidies, and trading schemes, however, I will focus primarily on emissions charges and taxes. Emissions charges are environmentally related taxes and are a compulsory, unrequited payment to the government and are a per-unit pollution fee. Charges and fines are economic incentives to reduce pollution as they cost the firms money, therefore a profit-maximizing firm will abate pollution whenever the fee is greater than the marginal control cost.

The command and control method is preferred in cases where the pollutant is so highly toxic that concern over their impact outweighs any economic efficiency concerns. Another benefit of this method is that it creates and uses new technology, can be used with any pollutant and any money made off of fines can be put back into research. However, the cons of this method include: to deliver its intentions, there must be direct regulation, which is achieved through appropriate implementation and enforcement. Any non-compliance to the command and control regulation introduces crucial challenges to its effectiveness. As well as this, the cost of compliance for companies can be high, and the costs can be higher than sanctions for non-compliance. It is also difficult to implement this method when the issue is non-point-source, as it is far easier to regulate emissions from a few large companies, though much harder when it is millions of motorists and many companies. The command and control policy also proposes no incentive to improve the quality of the environment past the standard set by law. Once the command and control regulation has been satisfied, polluters have no incentive to do better.

The emissions charges method has many pros, such as, they do not force firms to implement specific technologies, or that all firms reduce their emissions by the same amount. This allows more flexibility in their individual approaches to the management of pollution. They are also predictable in their costs - stable prices or percentages can help firms and consumers plan spending. They create a permanent and stable incentive to adopt a least-cost way of reducing emissions and continued technical innovation. They can be implemented relatively quickly and are comparatively simple to administer. They are a revenue source and money made from the taxes can go back into research. Cons include that there are no guarantees that emissions will decline if consumption of the goods and services that produce emissions remains relatively unresponsive to price increases (that is, price-inelastic). If the tax is set at too high a level, activities that are particularly sensitive to it may relocate to a location that does not have such policies. Effective emissions reductions require effective international action. The reality of different administrative capacities makes a coordinated and effective set of emissions taxes on an international scale a difficult objective to achieve. Last, of all, they are a tax and therefore are unpopular by their very nature.