Light pollution can rewire the human immune system and cause cancers, but Indians remain ignorant about it
All kinds of pollution is extremely harmful for human health, but the one that hardly gets talked about is light pollution. Why is this so, and can we choose between gentle illumination and dazzling light?
When my father died over two decades ago, my mother told my little niece that her Dadubhai or grandfather had become a star. They stood on our balcony in Kolkata, looking up at the night sky and trying to find the “Dadubhai star".
In childish euphemism, death was becoming a star.
I remember looking up at the sky the night my mother died this year. There was no need for childish euphemisms anymore. And it was just as well. The bright lights of the big city had long swallowed up the darkness. The night sky seemed emptied of stars. Only a handful were visible. Perhaps they were not even stars, just satellites.
Beset as we are with many kinds of pollution, we hardly pay any attention to light pollution. It does not smell. It does not choke our lungs or our water bodies. It does not deafen us. It hides in plain sight. Even I didn’t think too much of it until recently.
At the end of August I went on a night tour of illuminated buildings in Kolkata. The Kolkata Illumination Project by a citizens group called Kolkata Restorers has been lighting up old heritage buildings for almost two years—massive colonial buildings that house insurance companies and banks, an old market, synagogues and churches, a Radha Jiu temple and more. By day the buildings look imposing enough but the low wattage warm yellow LED lights make them come alive at night. They looked mysterious and beautiful.
A few weeks later, in the run-up to Durga Puja, I saw giant billboards, which later proved to be LED screens, that popped up in a park near my house. I felt I was surrounded by a battery of television screens flashing advertisements for leggings, kurtis and cooking oil, the shocking pinks, reds, yellows and neons screaming for attention. They looked garish and hideous.
The World Atlas of Night Sky Brightness, generated on the basis of thousands of satellite photos, shows the planet lit up like a Christmas tree. Admittedly it looks pretty. Come Diwali, we all get WhatsApp forwards with images showing the map of India lit up for Diwali purportedly seen from a satellite. They are AI-generated but will be nevertheless forwarded from group to group with Happy Diwali messages. The image, even if fake, glows with 1,000-watt pride.
The electric light bulb is indeed one of our greatest inventions. Having grown up with chronic power cuts, I have no nostalgia for the “pleasures" of trying to read by the light of hissing Petromax lamps and candles. But there is such a thing as too much light at a time when our body clock tells us it should be dark.
Just as air pollution and water pollution are linked to a slew of diseases, light pollution can wreak havoc inside us. A report in IndiaSpend cites numerous studies showing the connections between over-exposure to artificial light and health issues. Light pollution can cause stress and sleep disruption, reducing the production of melatonin, the hormone produced at night.
A 2021 study in Sleep and Vigilance journal looked at the importance of melatonin in the development and growth of cancers and immune activity. An Israeli study found higher breast cancer rates in areas with high night-time light. A Spanish study showed greater prostate cancer risks in people exposed to higher artificial light levels at night. Higher outdoor night-time light has been found to be a bigger risk factor for Alzheimer’s than alcohol abuse or obesity, according to the journal Frontiers of Neuroscience.
But when the Journal of Urban Management surveyed Indians aged 16-65 in 2022, it found 57% had not even heard of the term “light pollution". Others thought it was something to do with UV and other harmful rays in sunlight. Many thought it was “pollution which is not very harmful."
The health connections, direct or indirect, are little talked about. Instead urban development wants more lights, brighter lights, floodlights to build a city that never sleeps. In the name of public safety, the street outside my home now suddenly has glaring white light all night long. The same city authorities that complain about the visual pollution of billboards, green-lights their transformation into blinding LCD screens. Brighter the better is the lighting mantra.
The most revolutionary thing about the Kolkata Illumination Project is its muted yellow lighting. Mudar Patherya, the moving force behind Kolkata Restorers, tells me many people, impressed by the lit up buildings, wanted to do the same but they wanted bright DMX or Digital Multiplex Lighting with changing colours. And he would have to talk them down from it, telling them it would not look good on the building. While no light is good for night birds and other nocturnal creatures, he also consulted with experts to ensure the disruption was minimal.
Suyash Narsaria, lighting designer and founder of Optiluxx Electrical, which lit up many of the buildings Kolkata Restorers worked on, says it was a learning curve for him too. The Eastern Railway building spread out over a block needed about 450 lights and he says it took a lot of time to figure out the optimal light intensity. They reduced the wattage to make it more efficient, layered the lights so they picked out the details they wanted to highlight in the building. The result is the buildings are illuminated but never dazzling. And that makes a huge difference.
It’s a hard lesson to remember in a world where the mantra for success has become bigger and brighter. Things of quieter beauty get short shrift. We want to be remembered for building the biggest statue, the tallest building, the largest dam. A few years ago a Kolkata Durga Puja pandal that copied the Burj Khalifa ran into trouble with air traffic control because of its height and lights. And nothing seems to say tax rupees at work better than a city blazing with light all night long. Bright lights, big city is proof of India Shining emerging out of V. S. Naipaul’s Area of Darkness.
Yet darkness too is an old friend. This month I spent a few days in a nature reserve in Thailand. One night we were on a floating raft house in a huge lake in southern Thailand surrounded by limestone karsts. The cabins were modest and powered by solar energy. One could not even charge a phone inside the room. It didn’t matter because once we reached we realised there was zero connectivity anyway. The sunset was a stupendous blaze of orange and gold but as darkness fell, I wondered what we would do all night without phones and internet, just staring into the inky darkness. But as I sat on the deck overlooking the expanse of the lake, I realised I was finally in a place where, as Ray Bradbury wrote in I Sing the Body Electric, the lights could not diminish the universe. If I looked up, the sky was studded with stars.
I immediately wanted to identify the constellations and realised to my chagrin that my stargazer apps would not work without connectivity. So we sat there with beers, listening to the waves and looking at the sky above us, making up stories about twinkling stars I could not name or map, stars manifold and bright, looking down on us.
Suddenly, it seemed like those stories we made up of parents becoming stars were not so foolish and childish after all.
Cult Friction is a fortnightly column on issues we keep rubbing up against.
Sandip Roy is a writer, journalist and radio host. He posts @sandipr
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