Crops burning, lungs to follow

NEW DELHI: Winter’s coming, and Delhi’s annual nightmare is already taking shape.

Over a dozen cases of crop burning were reported from Haryana till Wednesday. This, in turn, would trigger heavy pollution in the national capital region.

“While 12 cases occurred in Karnal on Wednesday, one instance each was reported from Panipat and Kaithal earlier,” said S Narayanan, member secretary of Haryana Pollution Control Board. Teams are sent to verify crop burning as soon as fires show up on satellite images.

Agricultural stubble running into millions of tonnes is burnt by farmers in northern India every October. An estimated 35 million tonnes are set afire in Punjab and Haryana alone to make room for the winter crop.

Experts say stubble burning accounts for anywhere between 12% and 60% of Delhi’s air pollu- tion. The primary reasons behind farmers setting crop residue afire are cost concerns and the short time gap between summer and winter crops.

Although the NGT banned the practice in 2015, implementing the order has turned out to be a difficult task.

The Haryana PCB launched satellite monitoring to detect crop-burning with the aid of Haryana Space Applications Centre on September 22, and has collected penalties from farmers.

Punjab PCB officials, for their part, have written to the Punjab Remote Sensing Centre to launch satellite monitoring from October 1. “No such incident has come to our notice yet,” said an official.