On Monday, the Supreme Court of India described air pollution in and around the city of Delhi as a “crisis” and asked the Center and the Delhi administration to take action. With air quality index (AQI) readings in a toxic area lasting more than a week, it was inevitable suffocation concerns were being expressed and at this time of year the scourge of the haze had acquired such ritualistic regularity that the solution A push for this fate was in danger of being upset by the resignation. By suggesting, our apex court has put the issue in advance again. On Saturday, it had asked our officials to consider a “lockdown” among other measures. In response, Delhi closed schools for a few days, banned construction, allowed state employees to work from home and advised private employers to follow. The Delhi government told the court that it was ready for a “complete lockdown”, but it would not take effect until adjoining states did the same in the rest of the urban areas that make up the National Capital Region (NCR). The top court advised the Center to convene an emergency meeting and work out specific ways to deal with the identified “culprit”: construction activity, industry, transport, electricity and vehicular traffic, apart from stubble burning.
Various attempts have been made in the past. For example, construction projects are often put on hold during this season, which has little noticeable impact on the air quality of the NCR. Efforts have also been made to curb crackers, diesel gensets etc. There was little to show for a momentary ban on industrial exhaust and sweet deals to prevent farmers from setting post-harvest waste on fire. As far as local-area initiatives are concerned, smog towers and water sprinklers have shown themselves to be little more than much. The most controversial of the ideas so far has been road-ration, which was tested by Delhi five years ago, when only vehicles with odd number-plates were allowed on the roads on one day and also on the next. The results of that experiment went into a data fog with conflicting interpretations, but the fact that an odd-even road policy was never implemented again sums up its problem: it’s enough to justify disruption. Didn’t prove helpful. Yet, hardened by the stringent lockdown last summer to contain Covid, we can find that a worthy purpose is served by a complete traffic lockdown of NCR as we face our pollution season.
Street emissions have always been held up as Delhi’s main suffocation. According to an analysis by the Center for Science and the Environment, nearly half of the seasonal increase in the capital’s level of pollutant particulates is due to vehicular exhaust, which is no more than 2.5 microns, the worst kind. If so, traffic freezes for about a week or two, depending on the dispersion of the smoke in the wind, which will lead to a significant reduction. If even industrial sources of smoke are turned off (with a stop-gap supply), and we still have worse air than we expected, we have at least a real chance to accelerate our search for solutions. There will be data from the life test. The extent to which farm fires are to blame remains controversial. In court, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta cited the 10% estimate for stubble burning’s share of bad emissions as the average during the year, a figure that should cause consternation as it would have happened within a period of about a few weeks. Is. Whatever the reality, a smog thrown by differing political interests on the issue cannot deter us from taking both comprehensive and accurate action against the menace of toxic air.
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