阅读理解
Even by the standards of poor
countries, India is alarmingly — and unnecessarily — dirty. It needs to clean
up. Most time of year, its capital, Delhi，smells as if something is burning. That is because of many things:
the carcinogenic diesel（柴油）that supplies three quarters
of the city's motor fuel, the dirty coal that supplies most of its power, the
rice stalks that nearby farmers want to clear after the harvest and so on. All
these make Delhi's air the most poisonous of any big city.
This does not just make life unpleasant for
a lot of Indians. It kills them. Recent estimates put the annual death toll
from breathing PM 2.5 alone at 1.2—2.2 million a year. The lifespan of Delhi
residents is shortened by more than ten years, says the University of
Chicago-Consumption of dirty water directly causes 200,000 deaths a year, a
government think-tank estimates, without measuring its contribution to slower
killers such as kidney disease. Some 600 million Indians, nearly half the
country, live in areas where clean water is in short supply. As pollutants
taint groundwater, and global warming makes the vital monsoon（季风）rains more
abnormal, the country is poisoning its own future.
Indian pollution is a danger to the rest of
the world, too. Widespread dumping of antibiotics（抗生素）in rivers has made the country a
hotspot for anti-microbial（抗微生物）resistance. Emissions
of carbon dioxide, the most common greenhouse gas, grew by 6% a year between
2000 and 2016, compared with 1.3% a year for the world as a whole.
In the past India has explained its failure
to clean up its act by pleading poverty, noting that richer countries were once
just as dirty and that its output of waste per person still lags far behind
theirs. But India is notably grubby（肮脏的）not just in absolute terms, but also relative to its level of
development And it is becoming grubbier.
It is true that some ways of cutting
pollution are expensive. But there are also cheap solutions，such as undoing
mistakes that Indian bureaucrats（官僚）have themselves
made. By funding rice farmers, for instance, the government has in effect
cheered on the overusing of groundwater and the burning of stalks. Rules that
encourage the use of coal have not made India more self-reliant, as intended,
but instead have led to big imports of foreign coal while blackening India's
skies. Much cleaner gas-fired power plants, meanwhile, sit idle.
Reliant on big business for funding and on
the poor for votes, politicians have long ignored middle-class complaints about
pollution, failing to give officials the backing to enforce rules. That is a
pity, because when India does apply itself to ambitious goals, it often
achieves them
Next year it will send its second rocket to
the Moon.
Narendra Modi, the prime minister, promised
with admirable frankness when he took over to rid the country of open
defecation（缺陷）.
Four and a half years and some $9 billion later, his Clean India campaign
claims to have sponsored the building of an astonishing 90 million toilets.
This is impressive, but India is still not clean. Its skies, its streets, its
rivers and coasts will remain dangerously dirty until they receive similar
attention.
