Burning crop waste in Punjab in India, Pak adding to smog: Nasa

Burning of agricultural waste in Punjab in India and Pakistan in the last one week may be the reason behind the thick smog that has engulfed entire northern India, according to new satellite images released by Nasa.

Updated on: Nov 7, 2013, 10:17:16 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Burning of agricultural waste in Punjab in India and Pakistan in the last one week may be the reason behind the thick smog that has engulfed entire northern India, according to new satellite images released by Nasa.

Latest photographs released by US satellite agency showed hundreds of fire hot-spots (in red) across Punjab in India and Pakistan on October 27 and on November 5 confirming local pollution is not the reason for heavy smog.

Nasa in a statement on its website posted on Wednesday said: “When combined with smoke, such hotspots identify actively burning fires…Clustering of fires in this region is a common phenomenon each fall.”

The farmers in this region burn the waste from autumn or kharif crop while preparing land for plating the spring or rabi crop. “Farmers often use fire to return nutrients to the soil and to clear the ground of unwanted plants. While fire helps enhance crops and grass for pasture, the fires also produce smoke that degrades air quality,” Nasa said.

A Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) official said low disbursal of pollutants because of weak westerly winds had prevented the smoke to disburse into the colder Himalayan region.

The particulate matter levels in most cities of the region was about three to four times of the national air quality standard on Tuesday morning, which further increased during the day with vehicular traffic increasing after a two-day Diwali break.

Agra in Uttar Pradesh saw the particulate matter level reaching about 360 micro grams in a cubic meter of air while it was 260 ug/m3 in Lucknow.

Based on inputs from the weather department, the CPCB believes the pollution levels in northern India will remain on a higher side for few days.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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