-News18.com As the capital chokes in a toxic haze that was described by the Supreme Court on Monday as “worse than the Emergency”, and politicians across parties blame each other, experts point out that the 2009 Punjab Preservation of Subsoil Water Act changed the “timing of the burning”. New Delhi: Behind the burning of crop waste, or stubble, that poisons Delhi’s already-polluted air, is a story of changing agricultural practices, a...
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Punjab water law change, delayed burning, wind pattern behind NCR smog -Anju Agnihotri Chaba & Amitabh Sinha
-The Indian Express Farmers in Punjab and Haryana have been setting fire to their fields after harvesting of paddy since the 1980s. That was since the time combine machines, instead of manual labourers, started being used for harvesting and threshing their grain. Jalandhar, Pune: The problem of air pollution from paddy stubble burning is ultimately about a simple trade-off: between more smoke and less water. Farmers in Punjab and Haryana have been...
More »There are solutions to Delhi's pollution crisis -Bharati Chaturvedi
-Hindustan Times Instead of paddy, farmers have to be incentivised to move to millets It feels like a war. The hapless farmers of Punjab and Haryana pitted against the angry, breathless urbanites of the National Capital Region. The farmers are burning paddy stubble, contributing to between a fifth to a third of the air pollution in Delhi these days. This has pushed the air quality to unliveable levels. It is endangering...
More »Quick, proactive: Why Beijing's Grap works, and Delhi's doesn't -Jayashree Nandi
-Hindustan Times Beijing’s four-tier emergency response plan kicks in based on air quality index (AQI) forecasts and not actual recorded concentrations. Delhi’s deadly air pollution has exposed the lack of preparedness in NCR states to implement the Graded Response Action Plan (GRAP). It has also shown that many interventions under GRAP should have kicked in much earlier based on forecasts rather than when particulate matter concentrations were already peaking. Beijing’s four-tier emergency response...
More »Some relief at last from scorched earth tactics
-Livemint.com Since state administrations failed to contain the noxious smoke of farmland stubble fires in north India, the Supreme Court has had to order a crackdown. Here’s what else we could do There was hope for the residents of a broad expanse of north India, who faced a public health emergency due to air pollution, a significant part of which was caused by smoke arising from the burning of crop stubble—stalks of...
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