
India air pollution at 'unbearable levels' - hhs
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-50280390
======
fareesh
Some specific points that may be lost in the headline / cursory reading of the
article:

1) India as a whole is overpopulated and has a pollution problem. This
particular issue is limited to Delhi, however.

2) From the perspective of the magnitude and extreme levels of pollution, this
is a seasonal issue whose primary contributor, by a large margin, is farmers
burning off their crop stubble after their harvest ends. This has been
happening every year for some time (more on this below).

3) Political ideologues have hijacked this issue to push their pet issues like
automobile emissions and firecrackers. These are obviously important issues
which most reasonable people will agree ought to be curbed. Sadly a lot of
otherwise intelligent folks have a blind spot when it comes to these issues,
so there is a temptation to let it slide when these kinds of politics are
being played dishonestly, even though their motivations are different. By
emphasizing one's biased issues, the root cause is ignored, which helps
nobody.

On stubble burning:

There was a time when sowing paddy in the neighbouring state of Punjab began
during the first week of June. Harvest season would be mid October, and sowing
would resume in late November.

During the period between October and November, farmers would let the stubble
decompose over time. This required a lot of water and time.

Unfortunately this took a toll on groundwater levels. Government intervention
led to a reduction in water supplies to the fields during the summer (June),
when there was a shortage of water across the state. This led to a delay in
the sowing season (moved to July). The entire crop cycle got moved up, and so
the time previously available to allow decomposition of stubble had reduced to
barely a few days. Their solution to this problem was to burn all the stubble.

~~~
paulsutter
South Korea and Taiwan have higher population density than India, and Japan is
not far off (517/km, 652/km, 412/km, and 334/km, respectively)

> 1) India as a whole is overpopulated...

~~~
BurningFrog
Yeah, I've come to believe that the word "overpopulation" just doesn't mean
anything.

I would rather say Indian society is badly organized.

~~~
icegreentea2
Overpopulation is always relative. It means that the population at hand
exceeds the amount that existing systems can cope with. You can argue that
Indian society is badly organized and that their current population levels and
densities could be sustained with better societal systems, but that doesn't
quite capture how difficult it is to fix societal systems.

~~~
whatshisface
What's easier, improving infrastructure or lowering the population?

~~~
icegreentea2
I get your point - it's obviously easier to solve the problem (at least if you
want to act ethically) by improving infrastructure.

But that also has the risk of trivializing the problem. Improve infrastructure
is hard, especially in a compromised system.

~~~
BurningFrog
Genocide (which I assume is the "unethical" option) is also hard, and tends to
destroy infrastructure as well...

I do agree that improving governance is much, much easier said than done. And
to be fair, India _has_ had substantial progress.

------
throwaway8941
I have a ready solution to all their problems. They should simply do what we
did in Kazakhstan a couple of years ago: raise the maximum permissible
exposure levels by an order of magnitude and declare all of the previously
extremely polluted areas as safe. I am not sure it made the air look any
different, or had any effect on my chronic bronchitis, but at least the air
pollution indicators look nice: they are now permanently in the "green zone".

~~~
umvi
That's what I do with my code coverage reports. I just exclude any file that
isn't covered from the report and the report turns green and all the managers
are happy because it proves the code is of high quality.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
In the same vein this is a project to make your tests pass:
[https://github.com/auchenberg/volkswagen](https://github.com/auchenberg/volkswagen)

------
firasd
I found this great NASA imaging tool. You can see that all of Punjab is on
fire

[https://firms.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov/map/#z:6;c:77.5,28.8;d:...](https://firms.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov/map/#z:6;c:77.5,28.8;d:2019-10-27..2019-11-03;l:countries,firms_viirs,firms_modis_a,firms_modis_t)

Further reading on crop stubble burning:
[https://www.news18.com/news/immersive/crop-burning-punjab-
po...](https://www.news18.com/news/immersive/crop-burning-punjab-
pollution.html)

I realized this in 2015 when I was looking at the sky and got the small/taste
of something burning (and then I must have done some research). It has taken
several years for everyone to 'get' it because winter pollution is confounded
by other issues (low wind/rain, Diwali firecrackers, etc.) and people stop
paying this much attention to the issue after these couple weeks of Armageddon
--until the next year, when it happens again.

To this day the issue is obfuscated -- the media is talking about "Delhi
pollution" which enables rival politicians to make it sound like a local
governance issue when actually all of North India is under a cloud of smoke.

------
georgeburdell
>Harsh Vardhan, the union minister for health and family welfare, urged people
to eat carrots to protect against "night blindness" and "other pollution-
related harm to health".

A small part of the article, but I just wanted to point out the night vision
part is a WWII disinformation campaign by the British to hide the fact that
they had sophisticated RADAR: [https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-
culture/a-wwii-propagand...](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-
culture/a-wwii-propaganda-campaign-popularized-the-myth-that-carrots-help-you-
see-in-the-dark-28812484/)

~~~
stan_rogers
Not entirely. What the British did was to take a medical truth - that vitamin
A deficiency leads to night blindness, which is often the first reported
symptom of vitamin A deficiency - and transform it into a plausible "night
vision enhancement" story. Curing or preventing a problem is real; creating a
corresponding opposite super-power, not so much.

~~~
tialaramex
This trick fuels the modern "supplements" industry too.

(In the UK for example) You aren't allowed to advertise "This product will
make you smarter" because that's a lie.

But you are allowed to advertise "Vitamin D is essential to normal cognitive
function" and "This product has all the Vitamin D you need" which are both
technically true - and let the audience draw the false conclusion themselves
that they'd be smarter if they used the product.

The product maker has plausible deniability, and especially if consuming the
product has no major harmful effect they'll be allowed to keep this up. After
all there are also advertisements for fizzy drinks, booze, and plenty of other
products that are hardly a good idea, so what's the problem?

------
JumpCrisscross
> _A major factor behind the high pollution levels at this time of year is
> farmers in neighbouring states burning crop stubble to clear their fields_

What is the obstacle to fining these farmers? (Most agricultural systems have
moved past burning stubble.)

Do the farmers form a blocking bloc? Or are there other factors at play.

~~~
muktabh
Farmers are financially not that well off and a big share of population in
India is farmers. There is already provision of prosecuting farmers in law,
but no administration wants to punish the relatively poor + electorally
important farmers by enforcing the laws.

~~~
inapis
Punjab and Haryana farmers are by no means poor farmers.

~~~
kamaal
In India it's important to make a distinction between farm laborers and
farmers. Traditionally what people referred to as farmers in India are
basically feudals, and they are by no means poor people, they are easily some
of the richest people in India.

Farm laborers are a totally different set of working class people. Who only
until recent decades were into as bad as a thing like bonded labor. They work
on starving wages and are generally poor and from lower castes.

India for very long has given feudals unlimited loan bailouts, and freebies.
They also pay no taxes. Most of my friends who come from farmer families has
gone to do expensive education in countries like US. And they are often
confused with farm laborers and they milk this perception to the very extreme.

Imagine being so rich you hold large banks of land, make windfall profits, pay
zero taxes on them and get freebies(seeds, fertilizers, water, electricity)
and then being confused as the poorest people in India.

Its the farm laborers that need help. And they are unfortunately treated very
badly. Heck many people don't even recognize their existence.

------
Scapeghost
The ground pollution is not a walk in the park either

[https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=india+pollution](https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=india+pollution)

------
CamelCaseName
Tangent:

Does anyone know if/how the human impact of planting trees is measured?

What I mean is, what metrics determine the "quality" of a tree plant? I assume
this can vary greatly based on location and type of tree planted.

I often see impact quantified by CO2 removed from the environment, but what
about the impact on people nearby?

Would it be better to plant 100 trees in the center of New Delhi, where the
air is toxic and the population is sky high, or 10,000 trees in rural USA
where the air may already be very clean?

On topic:

This is incredibly serious as pollution has serious effects not just on
health, but on intelligence and behavior. It's a vicious cycle and India needs
to break out of it. The environment minister's comments in the article are
unbelievable.

~~~
BurningFrog
Trees might as best smell nice and provide shade. They do nothing to purify
air.

~~~
_iyig
Seems like it’s a bit more complicated than that:

“The relationship between trees and air pollution is a complicated one.
Particulate matter suspended in polluted air tends to settle onto leaves, and
certain gases including nitrous dioxide (NO₂) are absorbed by leaves’ stomata,
filtering the air and reducing pollution levels slightly.

But trees and other vegetation also restrict airflow in their immediate
vicinity, preventing pollution from being diluted by currents of cleaner air.
In particular, tall trees with thick canopies planted alongside busy roads can
act like a roof, trapping pockets of polluted air at ground level. To reliably
improve air quality, city planners need to give careful consideration to how
trees are placed.”

[https://www.sciencefocus.com/planet-earth/do-trees-reduce-
ai...](https://www.sciencefocus.com/planet-earth/do-trees-reduce-air-
pollution-levels/)

------
asenna
I will recommend anyone curious to know why the stubble burning issue has
become this serious only in recent times, to have a look at Shekhar Gupta's (a
well respected journalist) analysis from couple days ago -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAnSS6rdJCA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAnSS6rdJCA)

Tldr - Stupid laws trying to tackle heavy water consumption in the dry months
forced farmers to grow paddy 6-8 weeks later which then left them little time
to get the fields ready for next harvest and hence burning stubble seems like
a quick option (with no consequence to them).

------
kamaal
India as a whole is on the verge of some totally different set of changes
which won't end up well on the longer run. Pollution, excessive sugar
consumption, unhygienic living, sedentary lifestyles will likely destroy a lot
of what my generation is living through. This could be anecdotal evidence, but
I hear male fertility problems in men above age 30 very common these days.

Almost every home has people with diabetes/hypertension. And every
neighborhood has thyroid camps every now and then, and you see a huge mass of
women there. Dengue and other infectious disease breakouts are becoming common
and you see a rise every 6 months or so. There are waiting queues running into
months for open heart surgeries in affordable hospitals, which should tell you
the overall direction of health situation here.

This is beyond a total political meltdown looming above the whole country.

------
amriksohata
Industry, crop burning and other agricultural land use for animal production
has far bigger impact than fireworks for one day. The BBC are really ill
informed to post this as something that is even noteworthy, fireworks do cause
smoke, but the net effect on Delhi 365 days a year is nothing compared to
everything else going on causing pollution.

------
GreeniFi
Can anyone find on the internet:

1\. An explanation of how AQI is calculated? Some initial searching turns up
very little information as to the basis of the index.

2\. How the safety levels (green, orange, red, purple) are decided.

It seems somewhat opaque. Anyone know why this is?

~~~
zokier
About NAQI link here leads to the scaling tables, and there is also link to
Excel sheet to calculate the index value.

[https://cpcb.nic.in/National-Air-Quality-
Index/](https://cpcb.nic.in/National-Air-Quality-Index/)

For US, EPA has some additional info available:

[https://www3.epa.gov/airnow/aqi-technical-assistance-
documen...](https://www3.epa.gov/airnow/aqi-technical-assistance-document-
sept2018.pdf)

------
alienallys
Diwali is an Hindu festival where Indians burn firecrackers in millions.
Should stop the festival and firecracker.

~~~
trianglem
I doubt a single day of firecrackers contributes all that much to the
pollution.

~~~
palmanis
everything adds to it.

------
throwawaysea
I don’t see how we can address resource consumption and pollution more broadly
without population controls. We need a two child, replacement rate rule.
Otherwise we will continually play whack a mole with patching symptoms and
bickering politics. And yet no one wants to own up to this reality.

~~~
inapis
India is already at almost replacement population levels when you look at the
data nationally.

~~~
puranjay
To add to that, outside of a few states, fertility rate is well below
replacement level for most states.

The problem is that these rogue states have a) very high fertility (3.3 for
Bihar iirc) and b) very high base population which greatly accelerates
population

