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Countless headlines have sought to describe the grave air quality conditions prevalent in Delhi and the steps being taken to 'curb' this menace. But this exercise, of finding steps to deal with the plumes of smoke that transform the city into a 'gas chamber', is becoming a rather accepted annual affair.

As a thick blanket of haze settled over parts of northern India, including the capital, over the past few weeks, the official response has been marked by paralysis and lack of ownership.

It's not just the crop burning — a combination of industrial smog, vehicle exhaust and dust envelops the region every year as winter approaches and wind speeds drop. It's been particularly bad this year with levels of PM 2.5, tiny particulate matter that reaches deep into the lungs, climbing to over 600 at several places.

'Tried our best'

"We’ve tried our best to tackle the situation, but as policymakers, we've failed to address the main problem of stubble burning," a government official was quoted by Reuters as saying.

It’s not a new problem – it happens each year after mid-October when farmers start harvesting summer crops in the northern states of Punjab and Haryana.

With rising labour costs and a short window to plant the next crop, most farmers burn the stubble and straw in their fields to clear them for the next planting.

Since October, more than 40,000 fire incidents have been recorded in Punjab, as farmers disposed of nearly 20 million tonnes of rice waste, environment groups said.

But the stubble issue has become more acute in recent years because mechanised harvesters leave more of a residue than crops plucked by hand. Such harvesters are increasingly popular in the wealthy northern states, where farmer lobbies are also politically powerful.

"The situation has worsened this year because of the slow wind speed, which means the pollutants hang in the air for longer," D Shah, a scientist at the state-run Central Pollution Control Board of India, told Reuters.

Radical 'solutions' as stopgaps

In an attempt to tackle this problem, the authorities came up with solutions that were more desperate than sustainable.

Odd-Even: The Delhi government came up with a rather radical car rationing system in a bid to tackle the alarming pollution situation in the national capital. But the move, that allows odd-numbered cars (license plate) to ply on odd dates and even-numbered cars on even, has had no tangible results as the data about its efficacy is still contested.

When the AAP government recently asked for implementing another spell of odd-even, the NGT directed the counsel for the Delhi government to be ready with all the requisite data and show before it the reason for implementing the latest odd-even scheme.

On 21 April, last year, the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) had told the NGT that there was no data to suggest that the odd-even scheme has led to a decline in vehicular pollution in Delhi-NCR. The pollution monitoring body had said that there was no data to indicate that car rationing scheme has any impact on the decrease in vehicular pollution and the fluctuations in PM10 and PM2.5 is due to weather and change in wind patterns.

Aerial water sprinkle: The Delhi government had suggested recently that helicopters could be used to aerially sprinkle water over the city to settle pollutants. This move came following an NGT order, directing the government to track down all the hot spots with the PM10 more than 600 and controlling the pollution levels there.

But, as reported in The Guardian, the ambitious plan had to be grounded because the aircraft, ironically, cannot operate in the thick smog, underscoring growing frustration at authorities’ inability to address the toxic haze engulfing the city.

The city authorities had engaged a state-owned helicopter company to spray water over Delhi in the hope of settling the thick haze of pollutants. But on Monday administrators were told they would be unable to help dissipate the smog until the smog itself had cleared, the report added.

Anti-smog guns: The Delhi government recently sprayed water from an 'anti-smog gun' at the highly-polluted Anand Vihar area, but it had very little effect in containing the level of particulates, and they kept rising by the hour.

The device sprays atomized water (tiny droplets of water) up to a height of 50 metres, creating artificial mist, which is in turn expected to stick to air-borne pollutants and bring them down to the ground.

Interestingly, the pollution levels did not drop despite the fact that the water spraying from the device, which costs around Rs 20 lakh per unit, was largely centred around the DPCC monitoring station.

Bans: Authorities temporarily banned diesel-run power generators, construction, burning of garbage and plying of trucks with non-essential goods, but construction and truck movements were allowed to resume on Thursday as pollution levels dropped.

But all these measures are stop-gaps at best as none of them has proved to be effective in bringing down the pollution levels in a sustained manner.

Possible solutions

As argued in an earlier Firstpost article, cleaning Delhi’s air requires political will, unified planning, scientific thinking, engineering innovation, administrative compliance and cross-national cooperation, as it is indeed, a problem of north India. Any debate and dialogue around air pollution must not revolve around personalities and politics and must rather adhere to principles of science and prudent policy.

For air pollution, immediate and proven interventions like draft wind creation unit installations, virtual chimneys, road washing, conversion of road-dividers into bio-filters, usage of PCO paint to absorb pollutants, solar powered blowers and bio-filter green walls were proposed to be installed by the MCDs, DDA and PWD in a report by the Delhi government.

'Long-term interventions and schemes to be coordinated or executed by the Environment Department and the MCDs included green crematoriums, 150-point city-wide real-time air pollution monitoring, PUC revamp, landfill bioventing, construction and demolition activity management, incentivising LPG, the idea of mohalla kitchens, designs to end tandoor pollution, brick kiln redesign, market night cleaning, replanning of bus routes, congestion pricing, electric bus promotion, stringent parking policy and BRT redesign. It even suggested composting of agricultural waste and introduction of truck-mounted pyrolysis to replace crop-residue burning, a policy suggestion still relevant to north Indian states today', the piece quoted the report.

As for a possible long-term solution to stubble burning, we need to find another use for the crop residue. According to a report in The Wire, there is a way. Instead of burning the stubble, we can gasify it in a two-stage process that yields a fuel gas that can meet cooking, heating and power generation needs in the village in the first stage, and any type of transport fuel – diesel, aviation turbine fuel, methanol or CNG – in the second.