Despite being banned by the supreme court, farmers are still burning the crop stubbles. And nobody wants to enforce the rule because it’s a political suicide. Another instance of failed democracy where you need to appease to a vocal minority even if it means smog and deaths for the rest.
1. Lack of political willpower. It is still not considered to be a very high priority thing by those in power, and even the people who live in the region.
2. Again, due to politicians, bureaucracy, and their corruption. Example -
> In two years, Delhi (state govt^) spent Rs 68 lakh on stubble decomposer, Rs 23 crore to advertise it [0]
> ‘No other option’ — as its fields turn black & skies smoky, why Punjab won’t stop burning stubble [1]
Delhi is a separate state* from Haryana, Punjab, and Uttar Pradesh (states where stubble burning is very common). Haryana, Punjab, and Uttar Pradesh's politicans won't piss off the farmer bloc to help Delhi. It's the equivalent of the political battles all the western states are fighting over the Colorado River.
* yes it's technically a Union Territory but it's functionally a state
But many cities from these states also face high pollution.
Noida, Ghaziabad (UP), Gurugram (Haryana) are a few examples which are highly populated. Noida is slowly growing as UP's manufactoring hub, already being its IT hub. Gurugram is another IT hub.
A lot of this problem is also because of the apathy of the working class who reside in these cities.
How many votes can Gurgaon's urban population bring? Not as much as Kisan Sabhas in Sohna, Pataudi, Farrukhnagar, and Manesar. How many votes can urban NOIDA or Ghaziabad voters bring to UP Legislative elections? Almost nothing compared to farmers outside of either. Activism is strong in India - the kind of person who lives in a Housing Society in Noida, Gurgaon, or Ghaziabad doesn't know or care to partake in Gheraos, Bandhs, or Dharns to push their point through.
These are IT and manufacturing hubs and the respective State governments and the Centre gives them special attention because they want industries and jobs.
Maybe if the elites start taking their lives more seriously and threaten to move away from these cities we might start seeing some action.
> the kind of person who lives in a Housing Society in Noida, Gurgaon, or Ghaziabad doesn't know or care to partake in Gheraos, Bandhs, or Dharns to push their point through.
That's what I wanted to say with my earlier comment.
Yep, but Gurgaon's urban voters don't impact Haryana Vidhan Sabha elections. If I wanna become CM of Haryana, do I want to make 1 MLA's constituent's happy or 3 MLA's constituent's happy. All farmers know burning stubble is bad, but no government (Punjab, Haryana, UP) is providing the money to get rotavators. The only way this solution is solved is by including the majority in the conversation. And if they aren't, well that's Indian politics as you know.
It's interesting to see how long some ideas take to gain a foothold. I remember reading about zero-till farming in the late 1980s and how it improved yields, decreased erosion and saved on fuel. Fast forward to present day and one of the farming youtubers I watched just started no-till about 2 years ago. Last night I the same youtuber posted a video about ripping out fence lines because it causes issues with their harvest and is a source of weeds in the field, and I was surprised because farmers in the uk are now understanding that those same fence lines are an important source of biodiversity for the health of their soil and crops.
New processes in general take a while to propogate.
* working in a study is different from working on every field in the country, and some things are harder to put into practice than other
* some people have the mindset of, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, which is pretty easy to justify given how precarious and time-consuming of a lifestyle farming already is
* in particular, for changes that need capital investment, the precariousness of the field means that it can take time to secure the money to spend on major improvements
There are a large number of insect eggs and adults in the straw. Without burning the straw, the insects will spend the winter comfortably. Then, a large area of insect infestation occurs in the second year. It is necessary to increase the spread of pesticides, causing more environmental pollution and cost problems
How to best handle it actually depends on the region. Burying the biomass works great where the necessary microorganisms needed to break it down live in the soil. But that isn't everywhere, for instance where the ground is sodden. Like a peat bog.
In parts of the US they still very much burn the plant stubble in the fall. It creates a large amount of smog that irritates the eyes and give off an acrid smell.
This is a weird situation where the interference of the Supreme court feels inappropriate.
For one, the Supreme court has no job interfering in what should be bills and governance related problems. With the Supreme court making it their job, the govts get to raise their hands and shirk responsibility.
Stubble burning sounds like one of the dumbest ideas ever. Just leave it there and plant through it with your no till drill.
Leaving the residue on the field means your soil is protected against erosion and from exposure to the sun. The carbon in the residue isn't relevant but after three years the residue has decayed enough for the trapped nitrogen and phosphorus in the plant to become available to the soil.
In the North (Haryana, Punjab, western UP) you have 3-4 harvesting seasons with maybe a week between each other. Leaving stubble means you lose out on a harvesting season. If you want to maximize subsidies and your profit, it makes sense to quickly burn stubble and start afresh.
Farm fires are partially a result of legislation to prevent ground water levels from going too low [1]. Fairly multifaceted issue, not just electoral appeasement
I’ve had to stop visiting Delhi in the winter for my health. I left India over a decade ago and used to visit every winter for Christmas.
At some point I stopped being able to function properly there. I’d have constant migraines, nose bleeds and the last time I went I was passing out regularly.
The pressure inversions causing the higher smog density in winter is just horrific. Coupled with these farmers burning crops, it’s a nightmare.
There are days when you’re driving and you can’t see the vehicle in front of you.
I miss home, but I’ll really only now go back in the fall or spring. Summer is too hot to enjoy a visit.
Fall has the advantage of being after the monsoon so it has cleared a lot of the air and the temperatures are much cooler.
I have been to Delhi many times in my previous jobs. On one occasion one of my colleagues got massive breathing problems and needed hospitalization and oxygen. On really bad days cleaning your nose turned the tissue black.
Air purifiers are not able to keep up with the pollution especially if your house is not air tight. What works well is to make use of positive pressure systems with high performance filters [1].
These descriptions remind me of Pittsburgh back before the Clean Air Act in the US— one apparently had to pack a second white shirt with them to work as the first was soiled with smoke by the end of the day. Buildings were and are still stained black decades after air quality had improved. My environmental history professor while studying in Pittsburgh was being treated for lung cancer in spite of never having smoked, and he thought it likely due to how smoky the city used to be.
Pittsburgh's downtown and many poorer neighborhoods were located in deep valleys full of heavy industrial installations.
I hope India makes the same progress on air quality as it develops that many richer countries have. Seeing things like its maturing domestic electric scooter industry is a reason for hope.
The first time a coworker in Mumbai shared their screen for something I was shocked to see that the Windows weather widget in the taskbar had "Smoke" as an option for the current type of weather.
A few years ago when we had some e-coli water quality problems in our town which lead to boil-water advisory. It was eventually tracked to the badly maintained backflow valves and couple of dead rats in places or something. And it just so happened that we had a power outage after a storm knocked over a tree and hit the transformer. And there were fires. So. We went to a dinner where there was a great mix of south indians, north indians, someone from pakistan, and one of them said exasperatingly "I can't drink water, the power goes out, the smoke is choking - it's like I am in India again!"
Why is this shocking? Smoke is, unfortunately, fairly common in some areas, especially during seasons where there may be fires. A weather widget that doesn't have that as an option would be fairly negligent, as it's relevant to the weather outside.
The combination of Google Scholar and sci-hub.se is pretty great:
(2021) Sources and dynamics of submicron aerosol during the autumn onset of the air pollution season in Delhi, India
> "Local sources of primary PM in Delhi include transportation, domestic biomass and trash burning, cooking, and industrial and construction activities. Delhi is also downwind of many agricultural states such as Punjab and Haryana, which can be a source of PM from agricultural burning. Delhi experiences cool winters with shallow boundary layer heights and frequent temperature inversions, which trap
pollutants within the boundary layer causing especially polluted conditions."
It's pretty seasonal, with the end-of-harvest agricultural burning seeming to be the biggest culprit.
Interestingly, California passed a law 20 years ago banning agricultural burning in the Central Valley (one of the worst air quality regions in the USA), but only started to enforce it last year. As ever, it's about cost: chipping up ag waste and composting it back into soil costs more than just burning it, cutting into profit margins for Big Ag.
I lived near Salt Lake City for a few years, and occasionally (being a city built in what is effectively a giant bowl) you'd see inversions there. It was insane. Warnings not to go outside if you don't have to, visibility absolutely enters the gutter, and it can last days or weeks.
Utah has pretty damn clean air normally as far as I can tell. I couldn't imagine how much worse it would be in Delhi. I really hope they can get their air cleaned up, but it's hard to get people to give a shit about something like that when they don't earn enough to even know if they'll eat every day.
Of course! I suspect it's a function of how densely populated the area is. I visited Ladakh, and that was obviously much cleaner and nicer. Delhi, Agra and Jaipur were much more polluted, and my experience was limited to that.
I hope one day I can visit again and see more of the country, and not asphyxiate in the process! :)
And it's like that for large parts of the winter every year in Delhi. When I was there in Jan/Feb 2019 I remember checking the AQI at night and it was always 450-600. When I got back and all my friends/co-workers in the bay were freaking out that year about wildfires and AQIs of 160 you realize you get desensitized to it. I just kept thinking back to Delhi and how 160 would have been a relief after sleeping in an old house in Hauz Khas with no air filtration.
Also, it's wild to take off from Delhi in an airplane with smoke that thick -- you go from grey, smokey, low visibility to a bright blue sun shining sky. You just look down and see an orb of smoke engulfing the city.
On multiple occasions Delhi has exceeded 999, which is the maximum reading on the government monitors. I recall being there with 1000+ AQI levels. It's extremely saddening as most have no choice but to endure the toxic air.
However, the continuing situation of one group choosing to cause mass suffering for others out of an economic choice and no one can or will do anything about it feels a lot like one example of a global condition that doesn't bode well for the species/planet.
India has a pretty easy fix here, pass air quality laws with an enforcement mechanism at the federal level. It's internal to their borders, pretty different from a global issue that requires many types of governments and non-governmental entities to coordinate and make tradeoffs.
My thesis is, pick (nearly) any border in the world and you will find something like this happening inside of it, and that's the global condition that doesn't bode well. If we can't figure things out within borders, how are we to do it at the global scale, which as you point out is much harder?
Plenty of countries and localities have fixes in place for internal air quality issues. We've largely solved this in the US. Inida also has a lot of wood burning and 2-stroke engine vehicles. They have a lot of low hanging fruit here if they prioritize it. Dealing with atmospheric Co2 is a much bigger and thornier problem.
The US has largely solved the air quality problem, but the situation of water rights in the west feels to me like it carries the same tones of OP story.
India already has air quality laws. And an enforcement mechanism.
The issue is that local politicians are preventing the enforcement of those laws because the temporary economic inconvenience to their voting base (farmers) trumps the health concerns of people in another state.
And this is compounded by the economic reality of farming in much of Indian: in many years, the cost of chipping the plant remains, or even just preparing them to be chipped (assuming service is provided for free by government) instead of simply burning them can push many farmers into bankruptcy.
Lots of other countries have solved this and similar problems, I doubt it is beyond the capabilities of people in India to do the same. In 1970 Nixon one of America's more questionable executives established the EPA by reorganizing and joining a bunch of disparate environment related agencies under a broader remit. The requisite legislation that gave it teeth like the Clean Air Act were opposed by powerful interests, but it still got done. I'm confident the Indian government could do the same if enough people wanted to.
And then inevitably Farmers will protest, Western media will portray it as some popular uprising instead of a special interest group lobbying against the public good.
A pretty easy fix you say? You think they haven’t tried to fix it? Turns out that they also have to deal with different types of governments and non-governmental entities to coordinate and make trade offs. The central government simply lacks the capacity to overcome the obstacles.
“Why doesn’t the central government just…” inevitably is answered with “They can’t.”
If Richard Nixon of all people could establish the EPA in 1970 against economic and ideological headwinds then I'm sure India can replicate that success.
> Concentrations over 300 AQI are deemed hazardous by the international AQI rating system, which warns of serious health effects at this level of pollution. On Friday, some parts of New Delhi were even recording more than 600 AQI
Whole generation of kids going to have shortened lives and quality of life.
BTW this exists also in the USA, legally allowed toxic zones in populated areas
Not just toxic sites. Wildfires can really do a number on your lungs. As bad as Delhi's air pollution is, for a brief moment the air quality was worse in Portland Oregon due to a nearby wildfire.
Much as I love living out West, this might be the straw that breaks the camel's back.
Cars are that well sealed, and aren't designed for that kind of filtering.
At air pollution levels that high more filters for use in a home won't move enough air through the filter fast enough to matter and the filters will quickly clog and stop working. You can see examples of this in reports of US and Australian wild fires over the last few years.
For things like schools and offices you need a really large and sophisticated HVAC system to deal with that amount of shit in the air. I'd be surprised if any buildings in Dehli have systems like that.
I saw a bunch of personal air filtration systems meant specifically for cars for sale in Delhi markets when I was there. They're devices you run inside the car to filter the air already inside the vehicle. It's probably not great, but better than nothing.
And as for the HVAC systems, the luxury hotels definitely have them going. When I was staying there night time AQI would get up to 600, but if you were at a nice hotel it wasn't bad at all. When we stayed at an airbnb without a filtration system it was really difficult to sleep, I'd tie a kufiya around my face.
> I saw a bunch of personal air filtration systems meant specifically for cars for sale in Delhi markets when I was there
That doesn't mean they work. Cars just aren't well sealed in general and you need to move a lot of air through a filter to clear the space faster than pollution is coming in. You might make a small dent but it isn't going to be great. The second you open the door or turn on the A/C you've lost the game.
I'm sure luxury hotels have good HVAC, but an AQI of 600 is just not what any traditional HVAC system is designed for. Now there have been advances and a bunch of stuff was specifically developed for the Beijing olympics, but that's a much lower level of pollution. Even there, high end hotels are running two HVAC systems. It's clearly not impossible, but merely being wealthy isn't going to save you from that level of pollution, it's just going to be less bad.
This is a dumb take. NYC for example is 68th on the list. Mecxico City is in a depression in a mountain plateau, and car exhaust and other stuff gets trapped there. Dehli has the problem of agricultural burning in a neighboring state. Bejing among other things is still surrounded by industry and gets a lot of its power from coal, both of which are resolvable issues and they've made progress.
Everything in the top 25 of the list but Seoul is in a developing country and most of them use coal power or are in unfavorable geographies for clearing smog/air pollution.
Washington D.C. isn't even on the list and Paris, London, Berlin, Sydney, and Tokyo aren't in the top 60. All of the top 25 are industrial, poor, poorly situated geographically, or some combo thereof.
COP isn’t about localized particulate pollution. You’re confusing different issues. Yes, decarbonizing might fix a lot of their air quality issues, but it’s really largely about agricultural burning.
What does this have to do with COP and climate change?
Whilst this is of course an environmental issue, its a local, seasonal problem that is due to the geographic location of Delhi and farmers burning their fields among other factors.
The message in plain english from COP1 to COP27 did not resonate with the economic gains provided to the aforementioned trending capital cities predating the 21st century.
0=0+0 :p
The economic barriers to evolution are not a valid response. Its still 2022
it's not an unsolvable problem but more like a political issue. year after year it's the same and yet no one does anything. from what i recall it's the farmers from one state burning crop stubble and the resulting smoke gets carried into the other state (in this case Delhi - which is technically not a state). central government has beef with the Delhi government so they won't intervene.
My understanding is that the same party is in Delhi and said other state (Punjab) so I think it's a bit more than just the central government not stepping in (not to say that isn't also a part of it).
Finally an article on one of these crappy news site CMS where the non-JS pseudo-placeholder blurred out photos are only a tiny bit blurrier than the actual photos that you get shown when you execute their code.
I was in Delhi in June for the first time. The air was initially ok as it had rained the days before, but by day 3 our throats burned and we felt exhausted after a few hours outside. At that time, it was 110+F and the AQI was 300+.
The impact of that hit me when I was sitting in a taxi at a stop light and watching brick layers work. No mask, no sun protection, and in the middle of rush hour traffic.
Oct 2019 I flew to Mumbai and was a bit scared because of smog, only to find a huge and vivid city where everything ran on gas, as it seemed. No smog! How great. 2 weeks later my returning flight home was from Delhi and we haven't even landed in Delhi my eyes started to burn... I hope you guys over there will find a solution for this.
This is a unique year, because for the first time Punjab and Delhi are run by the same Govt (Kejriwal). The Delhi Govt. can't start its annual complaint about burning biomass in Punjab, because for once, they have the power to actually curb it.
> Kejriwal called for an end to “blame games and finger-pointing” over the smog and farm fire issue. “Farmers need solutions,” he said. “The day they get a solution, they will stop burning the stubble.”
The hypocrisy of politicians is deafening, all while millions of human-years are lost every year to this primitive practice.
The hypocrisy goes even deeper, as the farm bill would have directly addressed this problem. One of the 3 main demands of the mostly Punjab driven protests to the farm bill were to decriminalize crop burning. Additionally privatizing farm trade was expected to lead to more lucrative non-rice crops, but that too was revoked after the protests. The farm bill was arguably the most progressive and well-thought out bills proposed by the Indian Govt., and the reaction by the English speaking commentariat can only be described as deliberate sabotage. This is partly their burden to bear.
I might seem partisan in my comment, but after a year of being talked down to and called names by every respected western outlet, twitter and India's trigger happy-to-please-the-west commentariat, I do feel a degree of schadenfreude. I just wish them 'getting a taste of their own medicine' was purely metaphorical and not this literal.
> The air quality could further dip in the coming days as a large section of sown area in Punjab will be harvested this week, as only 45-50% area has been harvested till October 24. There is a 34% rise in farm fires in Punjab this year compared to last year. Haryana, however, has been able to bring down the farm fire events this year with 1,701 such incidents reported from the state between September 15 and October 28 compared to 2,252 incidences for the same period last year, which translated to a reduction of about 25%.
I was going to call out the BJP (which runs Haryana in a coalition) for being just as useless, but they have been the lesser of 2 evils, as Haryana contributes a small and ever decreasing percentage of crop burning instances in the region. Still think they were spineless in revoking the Farm Bill, despite having an overwhelming majority mandate and many years before the national elections.
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I'm glad neither me nor any of my loved ones live in Delhi anymore. I spent a winter there, and the smog would make me break out int spontaneous hives across my entire body. It is not fit for human habitation.
You know what always interests me about this is that life expectancy at birth is 74 in Delhi (3 years more than Mississippi). I wonder what a DALY-adjusted life expectancy looks like. Surely they must be all suffering from emphysema near the end.
Motorbikes in general, especially the cheap 125 cm^3 that are ubiquitous in the developing world, pollute horribly - especially relative to the power they generate.
I wonder when electric power trains will get cheap enough to replace them. Today, a rather bad electric-assisted bicycle is about the same price - so no one will buy one when for the same price they can get the rugged underpowered noisy smog-spewing mule that bears all the light duty transport imaginable and that everyone knows how to maintain.
In India, solar charging of mopeds might work good enough without a network, but I fear population density (10,000 per km²) and, ironically, the smog are holding that back. Solar might also be problematic in the monsoon season.
AFAIK it's not that kerosene per se is such a poor-burning fuel.
Kerosene is heavily subsidized, so that poor people can afford to cook. So gas stations blend in the cheap kerosene into the gasoline. The effect is that it lowers the octane, so the engines need to be detuned compared to what we might be used to in the West. And since modern engines are pretty finely tuned and finicky, might well be that detuning them causes an increase in emissions.
Also, I think the pollution comes more from lots of old and poorly maintained vehicles with little or no pollution abatement equipment like catalytic converters.
The auto rickshaws and two-wheelers are polluting, but I don’t think they’re a primary cause of Delhi’s smog. That’s probably industry and agriculture. The buses were heavily polluting as well. I know there was a major push to get cabs, auto rickshaws and buses onto LNG. I haven’t kept track of how much that has happened.
"Too Many People" is actually an idea with roots in fascist ideology, did you know that?
If you think about it, you can come to that conclusion yourself - just ask yourself, what is the ultimate ratio of this way of thinking? And who can decide between who belongs to the "too many" group and who not?
Also it is not a very analytical approach to solve problems. The problem is usually not "too many people", but people doing things in a wrong way, using old technology or doing things that should not be done at all.
