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Delhi haze: When farm fires poison the capital's air -Kumar Sambhav Shrivastava

-Hindustan Times

New Delhi: This winter season when Delhi’s chief minister Arvind Kejriwal pleads for votes in Punjab, the Capital’s residents will be pleading the neighbouring states for clean air. Each year, farm fires in the surrounding states raise particulate matter in the city’s air by more than six times the normal limit.

The air quality in Delhi has already started deteriorating . Last weekend recorded the worst air quality in the past three months. Last week, Delhi Environment Minister Imran Hussain wrote to the chief ministers of Punjab and Haryana to not allow crop residue burning in the states.

Over 25% PM 2.5 (fine particulate matter that chokes the airways) and 17% of PM10 in winters in Delhi’s air come from burning of agriculture waste in the fields around the city, shows a study done by the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. The fires start in mid October when farmers prepare to sow wheat by clearing the fields of residue from rice harvest. Among Delhi’s neighbours, Punjab is the most polluting, followed by Haryana and Uttar Pradesh.

“Unlike wheat straw that is used as cattle feed after the spring harvest, the rice straw from October harvest is not of much use. Some alternative uses are being promoted by the government but as compared to the production of rice straw, these are too few,” said Ridhima Gupta, PG fellow with the Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad, who studied the economics of farm fires in Punjab.

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