Some farmers in Punjab and Haryana are moving away from burning the crop stubble, using it to make mulch instead.
A week after Diwali, the smog over Delhi hadn’t lifted. The air was more toxic than any other city in the world. Wearing masks and holding up banners that said “We are not Hiroshima”, about 200 Delhi residents gathered at Jantar Mantar on November 6, demanding clean air.
Waking up abruptly to the problem, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal met the Union Environment Minister, Anil Dave, and urged the Centre to intervene. This wasn’t a problem that Delhi could fix, he argued. The pollution was coming from Punjab and Haryana where farmers were burning the stubble of the newly harvested paddy crop, sending fumes all the way to the national capital.
The next evening, while sipping tea at a roadside shop in Amritsar’s New Civil Colony, 70-year-old Harjit Singh, was irked when asked for his opinion on Delhi government’s claim. “Tell me one thing,” the retired civil aviation official said. “If crop burning was the main reason, there would be thick smog here too, right?”
The evening haze over Amritsar was nowhere as intense as Delhi.
“The winter wind is mild,” Singh said. “How would the smoke travel so far?”
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