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Fireworks & firecrackers; factory & vehicular emissions; burning of shed leaves & garbage; non-stop breaking & constructing ; blasts in Delhi ridge ; fires in shanties & back yards ; mafias, lobbies, gangs & corrupt authorities co-exist with smog.
Why blame the farmers and parali burning?
Lakhs are spent on smog causing traditional & modern explosives, lakhs are spent on their marketing and then we cry hoarse when get used instead of educating the country men against explosives.
Scrap is imported by well off business houses and when illegal roadside recycling takes place, we fine the small & poor recyclers instead of taking them under an umbrella and help them.
Clean air committees are constituted, newer steps are announced for eliminating smog, but no action is taken against mafias and lobbies popularizing lifestyles leading to smog.
Smog reduction is not a scholarly debate but action-oriented need. Have I missed action against mafias be it land, construction, and fireworks or lobbies be it car, fuel, plastics and lifestyle? Have I missed action against factories contributing to smog? Have I missed any restriction on number of vehicles being manufactured? Have I also missed total stoppage of blasts in endangered Aravallies?
I hear small shopkeepers being penalized for keeping small fireworks. I hear shanti owners blamed for storing inflammables on their roofs or yards. Yes, I see massive advertisements about new glitzy cars, chemical fertilizers and happy seeders.
And the loudest I hear is about stubble burning. Yes, I hear farmers being blamed for burning parali.
Let’s talk about the missed actions-
Improving the poor infrastructure in most of the 29 industrial areas of Delhi to eliminate illegal recycling of plastics, rubber , lead acid batteries, tyres etc. Raising per capita income of labour working in abrasive materials and equipment, adhesives, bitumen blades etc sectors.
Telling the farmers that if they just cut and plough the stubble, they will not only save money they spend on fertilizers, but they will also make soil healthier. Encouraging farmers to make brickettes of stubble and cow dung and making the power plants announce schemes for buying brickettes instead of using fossil fuel.
The easiest is farmers renting machines that eliminates parali burning from panchayats.
Just the other day workers spent the day clearing the parks of every shed leaf and piling them in the Dhalaov thus shifting the onus from horticulture to solid waste management department. In Delhi most trees are deciduous. They shed leaves once a year. When leaves are brunt, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen etc. combine with atmospheric oxygen and moisture and produce toxic gases like oxides of Nitrogen, Carbon Monoxide, Hydrogen Cyanide, etc. which get released in the atmosphere. The ash left behind is carbon and many a times laden with heavy metals like mercury and lead. As PM10 to PM 2.5 it affects human health and adds to the well-known smog.
While examining as to why London has fog and Delhi smog a disgusting fact got revealed. While in Delhi transportation by car is by 55.4 % in London it is only 10.24%. Every one of Delhi brats own a car. That suits the car lobbies that advocate for an automobile -centric society. This gets corroborated by the facts that Delhi has it has over 12 million registered vehicles and about 1.1 million vehicles enter and exit Delhi daily.
Aravallies the oldest mountain range in the world, a natural lung of the capital is blasted illegally in NCR creating particulate matter of various sizes and sand mafia contributing to smog. Details about that has been covered in an earlier article -Aravallies: a struggling guardian of north India’s ecology.
Let’s look at Mafias and smog. Land hawks locate land, nexus of corrupt officials and land mafia get land use pattern of green land changed to mixed land use, construction gangs construct illegally causing dust bowls and air laden with chemicals. Each time making the smog denser.
No festival in their houses is not complete without an hour long show of bomb bangs and fireworks. They do not use regular crackers but box -bangers. Each box-banger is a rectangular box fitted with 100 crackers. when lit they light the sky with innumerable bangs for a little over three minutes. For their hour long show number of boxes burnt is at least 20. Cost of one box is Rs. 86 thousand. Thus for an hour long show money burnt is over Rs17 lakhs and their contribution to smog heavy.
I say the smog of Delhi does not go because people who suffer have no voice and the ones who are responsible have vested interests. Here instead of helping the farmers manage parali they are harassed and blamed.
These pieces are being published as they have been received – they have not been edited/fact-checked by ThePrint.