-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...

-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...

-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...

-Down to Earth We are doing too little too late We can’t breathe in Delhi. It is a public health Emergency as pollutants in the air have spiked to extremely toxic levels. Officially, the air quality is in the severe+ zone, which means that it is bad for even the healthy, forget about what it will do to our children, aged and the already vulnerable. But what I want to discuss is...

-The Hindu Clean drinking water and sanitation are also important’ Deaths due to severe acute malnutrition (SAM) in India could be at least a tenth of what was earlier believed, which implies that instead of taking Emergency measures such as providing Ready To Use Therapeutic Food (RUTF), there needs to be a focus on non-food interventions such as sanitation, health, clean drinking water along with an emphasis on nutrition, suggests a new...