What is the issue?
The rising proportion of smog over Delhi is yet another reminder of the government's failure to act before an emergency.
What is the recent concern?
- The Delhi-NCR faces with difficult situation each winter when air pollution levels goes up out of control.
- Last year, the day after Diwali, air pollution levels were recorded at eight times the safe limit, in Delhi.
- In response, the Supreme Court-appointed EPCA, a body empowered to enforce the Graded Response Action Plan (GRAP).
- The GRAP aims to roll out progressively tougher actions as pollution levels rise, without waiting for an emergency to impose strict measures.
- The main objective of EPCA and GRAP is to institutionalize measures to tackle air pollution emergencies.
- Besides these, there was recently a ban against firecrackers in the National Capital Region.
- Despite these measures, pollution levels did surge after the festivities, though lower compared to the past two years.
- Notably post-Diwali smog never receded and very recently the city registered “severe” on the Air Quality Index (AQI).
- This comes along with a warning for serious health effects.
What are the administrative shortfalls?
- Response - EPCA is the nodal authority for tackling pollution in the national capital.
- With the recent serious pollution crisis, the EPCA has recommended a series of measures to be undertaken by various government authorities.
- It suggested that parking fees be quadrupled, and asked Delhi Metro to lower fares during non-peak hours for at least 10 days and introduce more coaches.
- But, the EPCA should not have waited for pollution to rise to the level of being a public health emergency.
- It failed to respond earlier when air quality was deteriorating due to long persistence of haze.
- Coordination - An even more serious problem pertains to the passive attitude of the authorities.
- The EPCA's proposals require at least 16 authorities to work together.
- However, there is a lack of coordination among the implementing authorities leading to delayed response.
- E.g. The EPCA wants to re-enforce the odd-even policy but the Delhi government is delaying to submit time-bound plan on it as directed by the Delhi High Court.
What should be done?
- The EPCA and the Delhi government should devise a coordination mechanism between various governmental bodies.
- This is essential to ensure the timely implementation of various policy initiatives.
- More importantly, the crop stubble burning practice in neighbouring states is a major reason for the present worsening of air quality in Delhi.
- Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan should stop crop stubble burning, in keeping with the National Green Tribunal (NGT) ban on the practice.
- There should be a system in place to facilitate subsidies for stubble-removing machinery.
- An alternative is the Bathinda (Punjab) district administration's use of MGNREGA to drive construction of compost pits in farm land.
- This aims at encouraging farmers to use the crop stubble as raw material for composting.
- Such inclusive, innovative and feasible practices could be implemented in other states as well, to address the multi-rooted air quality problem of Delhi.
Source: Indian Express, Financial Express
