As plumes of black sooty air rush out of the tailpipes of the countless diesel buses that snake through the streets of Kathmandu, poisoning the air we breathe and discolouring our blue skies, we do nothing to revolt. It begs a question: Do we even get what this dirty air is doing to us?

Do we realise what this poisonous air is doing to our throats, to our lungs, to our tissues, and to our lives? Do we get what this is doing to our children, the elderly and everyone in between? In Kathmandu, air pollution has become the single greatest threat to our lives. Air pollution is now the greatest risk to our health, well above the usual suspects like high blood pressure, malnutrition and tobacco use. On average, we are losing 3.4 years of our lives to it. In other words, the amount of life air pollution is taking away from us is arguably more than the amount of life any single health intervention is giving us back. Air pollution really has become our public enemy number one.

More Nepali adults die of COPD (an airway disease caused by air pollution and smoke) than any other disease. This is unlike almost all countries around the world, where heart diseases are the primary killer of adults. In the past decade, the burden of death and disability due to COPD has gone up by a whopping 30 percent in Nepal.

We don’t get the gravity of this situation because every once in a while, we make some noise about how bad Kathmandu’s air is. Maybe the issue really is that we aren’t brave enough to do anything about it. Because if we were, we would have done something by now. This raises the question: What does being brave enough really mean anyway? Does it mean being ready to pick up a fight? By that measure, we are the bravest. For we are ever so quick to throw a punch and raise a brawl at the slightest of slights. We burn tyres when diesel prices go up, and shut highways down when a bus hits an unlucky chicken. We have even attempted to burn the city down in the past, just because we were supposedly slighted by a celebrity somewhere.

But we do not take the streets to fight an enemy that is giving millions of us a hacking cough and a sting in our eyes? We do not rise up and revolt against an enemy that is making our living agonisingly miserable, and our deaths up to 3.4 years premature.

We don’t have to resign ourselves to this sorry state of affairs. The problem of the grey skies, poisonous air and an unlivable city is an eminently solvable one. Cities like Bogota, Seoul and Beijing have done it by making pollution control a top public priority, and committing themselves to the task. Kathmandu can do it too. We need to roll up our shirts and tackle headlong this public enemy number one.

Vehicular pollution is a significant reason for our terrible air. The smoke-spewing diesel vehicles need to be off our streets. So do the rest of the others that have a dirty tailpipe. A good place to start would be to ensure pollution testing is not a theatre of farce, where one can just pay through their vehicle emission test, even while their vehicle is belching out plumes of dark smoke. Vehicles that fail emission tests need to be put off the city’s streets. If this government is serious about converting petroleum-burning vehicles into electric ones, these public diesel buses would be a good place to start. Not only would we get rid of polluting vehicles, but we would also cut down on our diesel imports, not to mention use the clean electricity we are beginning to have in abundance. But we don’t have to stop there.

Given how devastating diesel buses have been to the quality of our air, it is somewhat late to require that all new buses registered for public transport in Kathmandu need to be electric. This has been done elsewhere; we can especially do it when one of the problems we are struggling with is finding reliable buyers for our clean power. Granted, the buses are expensive, but we could create thoughtful and feasible financing mechanisms to fund the purchase of these electric buses. Banks could finance bus purchases, and if interest payment is a barrier, we could use the millions of dollars we have been getting from carbon credit mechanisms every year to subsidise this loan.

In addition, we could use this financing mechanism to coerce small private firms that currently have a virtual monopoly in our urban transit system into a public benefit-orientated public-private urban transport utility. Municipal and other governments could be shareholders of such a utility, alongside private operators. Current private operators could be given a proportionate share of this transport utility, provided they agree to displace their current polluting internal combustion buses with electric ones. Several cities around the world have used variations of public-private partnerships to build their urban transport infrastructure.

With one clever policy move, we could not only get rid of the main contributor to the pollution that is suffocating Kathmandu’s air, but we could also create a green transport utility out of the ashes of Kathmandu’s current mess of a privately owned bus cartel. These are policy and programme recommendations that the government could easily put into motion with an exercise of a few weeks of work.

We could also go after the brick kilns and the ambient dust. These are things the government could do with a single stroke of the pen. Not only are these plans feasible, but they would also immediately start to make a positive impact on the lives of more than 3 million people who call this city home. They would also signal to the people and to the world that the government cares about the people.

Not to mention, this would also be the best way to announce to the world that we know that air pollution is an existential threat to us and that we are brave enough to fight it off. The open-air gas chamber that New Delhi has turned into is a useful reminder that inaction is not an option for us anymore.