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Smog Isn’t Just About Farmers – We Breathe the Soot of Our Own Ecological Sins

Indra Shekhar Singh

As the sun rises, the grey lingering smog comes alive in north India. Over the past few days (and decades), Delhi has become a toxic gas chamber signalling that all our tax rupees spent to clean the air have been wasted. AQI gauges are malfunctioning as air quality plummets beyond 500. But it’s not only our lungs but perhaps our brains that have become fogged. We have failed to see that historically, stubble burning contributes only 6% to the pollution, yet the public is quick to make the farmers the scapegoats, and not the policymakers.

One shouldn’t be too harsh on the public, as public experts and mainstream media are busy in political mudslinging and making the Punjabi paddy farmer India’s Public Enemy Number One. Without providing any real solutions, policymakers are keeping mum and deflecting the issue to the courts. Across state borders, the issue is highly politicised. So, it is time to examine the facts for ourselves.

The first practical consideration is ― air doesn’t respect political boundaries. Whether the factory or car is polluting in Gurugram or Noida or Bahadurgarh, people living in the NCR region have to breathe the same air. To get a shot at solving the problem, we have to consider the NCR region as one. Shifting factories from Delhi to the NCR regions of Haryana or UP is equally bad, if not worse.

Medical experts and researchers say that vehicular pollution is the main source of the toxic PM2.5 pollution. Industries come next, followed by construction-related activities which raise dust. Burning of coal and other biomass also contributes to bad air. Mumbai, which is right on the sea, saw very bad air days without the benefit of any stubble smoke. Vehicles and industries are the major source of air pollution, not farmers.

Stubble burning is episodic, occuring in a short window of time between the kharif harvest and rabi sowing among industrial paddy farmers, and contributes about 6% to air pollution. Stubble smoke is denser and visible to the naked eye, while vapours and NO2 and carbon monoxide emitted from cars and industries are not. Although these non-farm sources produce deadlier smoke, the non-visibility helps them evade public attention.

If we look closely, we find that every year, long after the stubble burning period is over, the air quality in the NCR region remains poor, if not severe. What causes the air to remain bad? When we compare the pollution data not just for Delhi but the entire NCR region, it is clear as rain that it produces the major chunk of the pollution it breathes. In the summer and monsoon months, due to favourable winds and weather, pollutants are removed from our skies, but when winter comes, all the pollutants condense over north India. The retreating monsoon winds also bring with them the pollution and smoke from all over the northern Indian subcontinent, not just India.

So, it is very wrong to vilify farmers for air pollution.

Having shown that stubble smoke is responsible for 6% of the air quality problem, we must try and find solutions for it. The stubble problem is new. Punjab and Haryana hardly grew paddy, because the local cuisine includes very little rice. Most rural households use wheat or corn as the staple cereal.

Paddy farming began in Punjab after the Green Revolution and the development of irrigation systems. Farmers were forced to shift from native landraces and crops to Green Revolution paddy seeds. These new varieties were bred for higher uptake of agri-chemicals like urea, potash, etc and focused on producing more grains. The collateral damage was cattle, the Indian farmer’s best friend. The newer seeds had edible grains, but the straw was no good for fodder.

Since it has no economic value and cannot be used as cattle feed, the government encouraged farmers to burn the paddy stubble. Over time, this post-harvest problem has picked up.

If it’s the government that started this problem, it has the moral duty to find a solution for it, too. Especially because a large chunk of the budget of the national clean air programmes go unused.

The simple and efficient solution is to give farmers price support of Rs 2,500 per acre to clear the stubble in an ecologically safe manner. An entire supply of stubble or parali-based raw material can be generated from paddy fields. If stubble or parali becomes economically valuable for farmers, no one would burn the fields.

Through a combined multi-state action plan, the government can have dedicated mandis for stubble paddy straw trading. Like paddy, its straw can also have an MSP-like programme. Now, you may be thinking this is a subsidy, but it isn’t.

Paddy straw or stubble has multiple uses and the government only needs to regulate the market by offering a floor price. From the biochar industry (carbonised biomass) to mushroom cultivation and sustainable packaging, state governments can take the initiative to help organise this sector and turn paddy straw from waste into raw material for various industries.

Taking an ecological step further, the government may have a special MSP for ecologically produced paddy. This would ensure that farmers are rewarded for growing basmati and other native landraces. The straw from these fields could help fill the national fodder deficit, which is 10-15% every year.

The stubble problem is an agrarian problem which can be easily fixed with the right policy decisions. The question is, will our policymakers actually listen and help make 2024 stubble burning free? It’s not just about the farmers. Every year, we breathe the soot of our own ecological sins.

(Indra Shekhar Singh is an independent agri-policy analyst and writer. He is former director, policy and outreach, NSAI. He also hosts The Wire’s ‘Krishi ki baat/Farm Talks’. Courtesy: The Wire.)

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Air Pollution in India: A Nightmare That Continues to Haunt

Debi Goenka

I am writing this on November 5, and winter is yet to set in. But both the Mumbai Metropolitan Region and north India are poisoned with highly polluted air. This happens year after year and will continue ad nauseam unless the government gets its act together.

First, let us look at the major sources of pollution. Not necessarily in order of priority, but these top the list of culprits: vehicles, industries, coal-based power plants, construction activities, burning of garbage and other solid matter, loss of greenery.

Second, let us look at the multiple agencies set up to deal with these issues: the Ministry of Environment, Forest & Climate Change (MoEFCC); the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB); State Pollution Control Boards (SPCBs); a plethora of planning authorities such as the BMC, TMC, MMRDA, CIDCO, NMMC, MHADA, and BPT (in and around Mumbai alone); the Transport Commissioners, the Metro Authorities, the Railways, the public bus transport authorities, and so on. Each has its own role to play. What is unfortunate is the fact that in practice almost all of them fail to do what they were set up to do. Given that air pollution is not limited by administrative boundaries, the problem becomes even more complex. More about this later.

Third, let us look at the role of the judiciary. With the best of intentions, our courts have failed to tackle the challenge. There are several complex court orders issued by the Supreme Court, the Bombay and Delhi High Courts, and the National Green Tribunal (NGT) that are obviously not being implemented. There are many reasons for this—the orders are complex, not easy to understand, and sometimes contradictory. The judges are obviously not experts and tend to rely on the recommendations of “expert committees” that are often packed with consultants and officers who have failed to discharge their duties. The NGT is supposed to have expertise, but sadly most technical experts are forest officers with no expertise, or former members of the MoEFCC, the CPCB, or SPCBs, who, in most cases, have spent entire careers not doing their jobs.

Fourth, let us look at the role of politicians. The Central government launched with great fanfare a National Clean Air Action Plan, which is meant to cover more than 100 cities classified as “non-attainment” cities, that is cities that do not meet the prescribed air quality standards. This, despite the fact that India’s air quality norms are perhaps the laxest in the world, already perhaps 10 times higher than comparable WHO standards.

Fifth, there is a dearth of reliable real-time air quality data. For decades, we have been fed with wrong data. As a former member of an MoEFCC expert committee, I was routinely told that the air quality standards even in Chembur, the infamous gas chamber of Mumbai, were within permissible norms. It was only when the US government started monitoring air quality in Delhi and Mumbai inside their premises that we realised how misleading the CPCB and SPCBs data were. And without reliable on-time data, it is not possible to implement the much-touted Graded Response Action Plan (GRAP). Whilst Delhi has a fairly comprehensive GRAP, Mumbai’s GRAP was prepared in utmost secrecy and is not worth the paper it is written on.

Finally, what seems to be missing is basic common sense. You do not have to be an expert to realise what is wrong. Common citizens may not know technical jargon, but most will know the most troubling source of air pollution in their neighbourhoods.

Vehicular pollution

What are the solutions? As far as vehicular pollution is concerned, improvement in technology is not going to solve the problem. Private vehicles will continue to pollute; even electric vehicles or Bharat Stage VI or CNG vehicles are polluters. The only solution is to get as many private vehicles as possible off the roads and concentrate on improving the quality of public transportation.

You may well ask, how do EVs (electric vehicles) pollute? The answer is simple: the batteries are recharged using electricity generated from coal-based power plants; the rubber particles from the car tyres contribute to particulate emissions; and there is the constant problem of recirculated road dust. What is therefore necessary is to ban all non-essential private vehicles on bad pollution days and make public transport free on those days.

As far as highly polluting industries and coal-based power plants are concerned, there is no logical reason why they should be allowed to operate in highly congested or highly populated areas, particularly if they are more than 25 years old and do not have the best air control technologies in place. Whilst the Delhi government has shut down such plants in Delhi, Mumbai’s power plant merrily continues, along with two refineries and a fertilizer factory, helped with the overt support of the MoEFCC, the CPCB, and the Maharashtra PCB, which have for decades been stating on oath that these units meet all requisite standards.

Mumbai’s major bane is construction activities. Thanks to the relaxation in building norms in terms of the permissible built-up area (by 300 per cent to 500 per cent), accompanied by a reduction in premiums that builders have to pay, the entire city has become a construction site. Shockingly, this has been implemented without a carrying capacity study. Besides private builders, there are several infrastructure projects adding to the pollution, such as the disastrous coastal road project, new Metro lines, flyovers, bridges, and so on. Who will regulate the regulators?

We also need to remember that pollution from construction activities is not confined to the construction sites: it spills into the already congested roads, particularly those blocked for Metro construction activity, and onto pavements, which are blocked with sand, trucks, and cement mixers. Ready-Mix Concrete plants, blithely operating in residential areas, are another major source of pollution. Construction debris is another huge contributor to pollution. Mumbai needs to emulate Delhi and ban all non-essential construction activities on high pollution days.

Contentious issues

There is no reason why one must demand or permit the bursting of firecrackers or the burning of garbage and solid wastes in highly polluted urban environments. What is needed is the strict enforcement of this ban. Sadly, even this is missing.

Similarly, the greed of our builders and decision-makers has allowed the indiscriminate destruction of greenery and green spaces. Every single tree is important and irreplaceable. And every square centimetre of green space must be protected from devilopment. The so-called approach of planting 10 trees for every tree cut down or even tree transplantations are exercises in futility; they do not work in practice and in no way address localised air pollution. Smog towers are another bad joke: they just do not work. And why on earth would you cut a tree and replace it with a smog tower?

Stubble burning is another highly contentious issue across north India. The solution is simple, but it is inextricably entwined in politics. Simply speaking, a well-intentioned attempt to conserve water has become an air pollution nightmare. Coupled with the wrong choice of crops and the lack of financial incentives for other crops, this nightmare will continue.

Mumbai has one of the most efficient and affordable public transportation systems in the world; suburban trains are the city’s lifeline. Yet, for rather obvious reasons, rather than upgrading this network, the government spends tens of thousands of crores on Metros, which are over-delayed, over budget, and unaffordable. Even the first operational Metro I project—one heavily utilisable since it is a badly needed east-west connector—is in deep financial trouble.

We have also forgotten the lessons we learnt from the COVID lockdown. Working from home, shutting down construction because there were no workers, the absence of non-essential private vehicles on the streets. What did we get? Blue skies in winter.

Obviously, implementing these will lead to financial losses. It will impact industries such as construction and coal-based thermal power plants. Builders will, of course, recover losses by hiking rates or asking for more tax breaks. But the country will benefit in terms of health, longevity, and a better quality of life. Since the loss of GDP because of air pollution has been estimated to be as high as 3 per cent, this will not actually be a very high price to pay. Perhaps we can even put in 70 productive hours a week if the air quality improves! The bottom line is that we need to do whatever needs to be done as a top priority.

One of the most difficult tasks is to get government agencies to work. And to get them all to work in tandem is almost impossible. This is further complicated by politics. What we need is statesmanship, which inspires governments at all levels to work together. If we believe that will always be a dream, we will continue to die in this nightmare.

(Debi Goenka is executive trustee of Conservation Action Trust in Mumbai. For lack of space, this article dispenses with technical and legal jargon. And devilopment has not been misspelt. Courtesy: Frontline magazine.)