There’s no crop burning presently, so why is Delhi’s air so polluted?

The Print , Tuesday, December 05, 2017
Correspondent :
Traditional sources of pollution combined with weather factors have resulted in Delhi’s air quality worsening again.

The Sri Lankan cricket team held up the second day of the India-Sri Lanka Test match for over 20 minutes, blaming breathing difficulties due to the terrible quality of Delhi’s air. Unlike the last time when Delhi faced a spell of bad air quality, this time it’s not crop burning, but a mix of factors to blame.

Dr Suresh Jain, Professor and Head of the Department Of Energy and Environment, TERI University said that the pollutants are not being dispersed because of meteorological reasons. However, the factors causing pollution, he said, have more or less remained constant.

“A few weeks back the major contributor was agriculture burning, but now it’s not that,” said Jain. “If the temperatures are dropping, there might be other sources, like the burning of refuse to escape the cold. That could contribute to air pollution.”

For the first time since 14 November, the air quality has dropped to ‘hazardous’ as of Monday morning, according to AQI data released by US Embassy.

A report filed by IIT-Kanpur in 2015 for the Delhi government had listed the biggest sources of pollution in winter as: secondary particles (25-30 per cent), vehicles (20-25 per cent), biomass burning (17-26 per cent), burning of municipal solid waste (8-9 per cent), and minimal contribution by road dust. The Environment Pollution Control Authority had imposed a penalty for burning waste in October.

“The three most important meteorological factors are the drop in temperature, the increase in moisture, and a drop in the wind speed. These three factors are governing the low dispersion— or high accumulation— of air pollutants close to the ground,” Jain said.

Jain said that rainfall expected later this week would help bring down air pollution levels drastically. However, an increase in wind speed is what would help disperse the pollutants.

Polash Mukherjee, a senior research associate at the Centre for Science and Environment, said that ambient levels of air quality in winter are bad because of continuing practices, but the current air quality is not out of the ordinary.

“This is the regular level we see during winters every year,” Mukherjee said, adding that it is usual for air quality to fluctuate between ‘poor’, ‘very poor’, and ‘severe’ in winter.

“It gets so bad in winter because of the various sources of pollution which affect Delhi around the year.”

Both say there’s no easy way to resolve the issue.

“It’s really unfortunate that this is happening, but part of the problem is that the solutions are really unpopular and require a lot of political will to carry it out,” Mukherjee said, referring to methods like the odd-even rule for cars. “These are essentially really unpopular steps in a democracy like ours.”

 
SOURCE : https://theprint.in/2017/12/04/no-crop-burning-why-delhi-air-polluted/
 


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